Tag: Stephen Crabb

Recently the Morning Star ran a critique of the notion of ‘Mental Health First Aid’ courses. I was greatly pleased to read it, because I’ve long been of the opinion that ‘Mental Health First Aid’ is dangerous simplistic nonsense and as the Morning Star argued, it is being used to absolve the Gov’t of their responsibilities to people with mental health problems. ‘Mental Health First Aid’ is never going to address the problems of seriously ill people but it could lead to a false level of confidence among the folk who have been ‘trained’ with regard to their ability to solve the problems of people in serious distress and lead to the First Aiders being in danger of seriously screwing up. The Morning Star introduced the old chestnut of ‘more money for mental health services’ – there’s not a lot of point in giving the mental health services more money at the moment, it will just be metaphorically pissed up against the wall along with the rest of the money that they’ve already swallowed. There is no point giving them more money to do more of what doesn’t work. The Morning Star however did make the salient point that the Gov’t would be better off concentrating on matters like suitable housing for people with mental health problems, with which I would completely agree. People are subjected to expensive ‘treatment’ which is frequently ineffective or even abusive, yet their basic needs such as accommodation and income is being ignored.

The Daily Post Online has been brimming over with stories of serious problems regarding homelessness in north east Wales. It was reported that Flintshire Council have put a load of homeless people up in the Pontins Holiday Camp at Prestatyn. Flintshire Council have stated that their homeless service is at ‘breaking point’ – in Sept 2016 there were 1,600 people on the waiting list. Flintshire Council may be at breaking point, but Wrexham County Borough Council has actually broken. An ‘encampment’ of homeless people has been established on the site of the old Grove School in Wrexham – there’s a lot of people there and they’re living in tents. The Council has delivered some portaloos to the site, but Nigel Lewis, the Chairman of Wrexham Town Centre Forum, maintains that the facilities at the encampment are insufficient. He points out that the Third sector and the Council have failed to solve this problem and that a different approach is needed. Mr Lewis wants Wrexham to take a leaf out of Bristol’s book and house the tent-dwellers in shipping containers once winter arrives. Mr Lewis seems to have suggested this because he knows that there’s no chance of houses for any of them. What have we come to when moving into a shipping container is a step up? I know that a creative artist could, with time and a bit of money, probably work on a shipping container and convert it into a unique and interesting home, but I don’t think anyone’s going to do that for the people living on the site of Grove School. I suspect that what will happen is that a job lot of shipping containers – probably acquired on the cheap – will be unceremoniously parked on a brownfield site somewhere and that will be the ‘housing’. Furthermore, it will probably then be argued that anyone living in a shipping container is now ‘housed’ and they’ll never be offered anything else. If they move out of the shipping container, they’ll be deemed to have voluntarily made themselves homeless and they’ll never be allowed on a housing waiting list again.

It’s particularly ironic that these stories have emerged, because earlier on I was browsing through Hansard and I came across the account of the Commons Welsh Affairs sitting of 28 Feb 1984, the annual ‘Welsh Day’. Lord Crickhowell aka Nicholas Edwardes, the then Secretary of State for Wales – star of posts ‘I Want Serious Money Now Please’ and ‘Corruption Bay Special’ – was speaking and being questioned by a number of Welsh MPs. Dafydd Elis-Thomas and other MPs were doing all that they could to tell Edwardes that if the Conservative Gov’t did not start investing in a bigger council house building programme, there would be a crisis in future years. Edwardes, in true Minister-of-Thatcher’s style, was having none of it and boasted about the Tories’ successful housing policies. If you’d built those houses Edwardes, there wouldn’t be people living in tents looking forward to moving into a shipping container when the inclement weather arrives.

Edwardes was also challenged by furious Welsh MPs who were quoting the figures relating to the problems that Wales had encountered since Edwardes became Secretary of State in 1979 in terms of the thousands of people who were unemployed, the number of major employers who had shut shop etc. Edwardes responded by using the discourse of ‘change’, that some businesses would die, some would grow, that failing firms would collapse but nonetheless the economy was growing, that ‘failure and closure go hand in hand with success and growth’ and that Wales had to ‘adapt to change’. Furthermore, under the Tories new technology based businesses would soon be erupting into life all over Wales, just like Silicon Valley. I’m still waiting Nicholas – they haven’t arrived yet. Edwardes’ warned everyone that there would be closures in the south Wales coalfield but they were of course necessary. He was however delighted to announce a huge new investment in the steel works at Port Talbot – although they’re about to go tits-up down there thirty years later under another Tory Gov’t.

Edwardes’ pride and glory though, the enormous ‘investment’ that he banged on about at length to explain how much Thatcher’s Gov’t was doing for Wales, was something that he called the ‘south Cardiff initiative’ – yes, Edwardes was hailing the arrival of Corruption Bay, the massive scam that I have detailed previously on this blog, from which Nicholas Edwardes and some of his friends made a mint because they were directors of the businesses and quangos who were central to the development. My interest in Corruption Bay was aroused by the Welsh blogger Jac O The North who provides full details on his blog – Jac has always argued that Edwardes and his mates had the whole thing planned out years before they joined the contracted companies as Directors and raked in the profits from the publicly funded bonanza themselves. In the light of the comments that Edwardes made in the Commons on Feb 28 1984, it rather looks as though Jac is spot on. All the proposed ingredients are mentioned by Edwardes – the millions and millions of Gov’t dosh that would be available for the ‘initiative’, the availability of dosh from the ‘urban development grant’ and the names of the companies chosen by ABP and LAW to carry out the work. Edwardes trumpets the central theme of the ‘initiative’ as being a ‘collaboration between the public and private sectors’. That’s right Edwardes, you planned the ‘collaboration’ whilst you were in office, you gave the green light to the huge amount of public money that was given to the quangos involved – quangos on which your friends and business partners were sitting – then once work was underway, you resigned from office, shuffled off into the Lords and then joined the Boards of the companies that your mates on the quangos had contracted to do the work.

Edwardes mentions that the famously corrupt WDA would be building the first centre for advanced technology at Deeside Industrial Park. The plan was for this centre to house Newtech, ‘an organisation for technical research, development and innovation formed jointly by Clwyd County Council and NEWI’. Edwardes stated that Newtech had recently received urban programme backing from the Gov’t. This all sounds very familiar. My post ‘A Vampire At Glyndwr University!’ detailed the backgrounds of the Chancellor and some of the governors at Glyndwr University (previously NEWI). There are multiple conflicts of interest in evidence – there is obviously an extensive game of musical chairs going on in north east Wales, with a network of people log jamming all the positions in the County Councils, the Boards of local companies, the Council of Glyndwr University, the Magistrates Bench etc. The people in those positions today have been circulating around for decades – some of them will have benefited from the investment in Deeside that Edwardes announced in 1984.

Keith Raffan, the Tory MP for Delyn, paid tribute to Edwardes and his colleagues at the Welsh Office regarding the setting up of the Delyn enterprise zone in Flint – there had been over £8.2 million in land reclamation. They had also received an urban programme grant of more than £1 million – much more than the local borough had expected. Raffan felt that this was confirmation of the ‘excellent management’ of the borough.

But guess what else is recorded in Hansard? That there is a serious financial crisis in Clwyd County Council. They were flat broke and had to dip into their reserves. The situation is so dire that the Council planned an enormous rise in the rates, so high that it caused a row in Parliament. Nonetheless the Chief Executive’s office alone employs 34 staff and redundancies are not suggested. The Chief Exec in 1984 was Mervyn Phillips. Who was in charge of the Clwyd County Council that were running the dreadful mental health services and the children’s homes where children were being abused and trafficked into prostitution. Clwyd County Council were not spending their money on health or the social services. So where was it going? I have previously provided examples on this blog of occasions when funds from Clwyd Council had been embezzled and of Chief Execs of Clwyd who somehow managed to liberate huge sums of money to prop up the charities with which they were involved – which resulted in some of them receiving gongs. For the full details see post ‘Ain’t Nothing Clean – Not Even The Welsh Calvinistic Methodists’. In this post though I will confine myself to mentioning that one of the most serious offenders, Mervyn Phillips, was a Director of Bodelwyddan Castle Trust. Hansard 28 Feb 1984 records angry MPs raising questions about the ‘extravagant amount’ that was spent on Bodelwyddan Castle to transform it into a tourist attraction.

The Welsh Office knew about the paedophile gang that was operating in Clwyd, the wider Tory Party openly discussed the fact that Sir Peter Morrison the MP for Chester was sexually abusing boys and was visiting children’s homes in Clwyd. The Welsh Office were concealing both the abuse of children in north Wales and the abuses of the mental health services who were facilitating the paedophile ring. So Edwardes was faced with a bankrupt Council who ran the children’s homes that were trafficking children into prostitution – to other MPs as well as Morrison. At the same time he was giving huge quantities of public money to businesses on Deeside and in Flint – which were run by some of the same people who ran the Council, the Social Services and the Health Authority that facilitated the paedophile gang. People who also packed the benches of the local Magistrates Courts – no wonder so few of the members of the paedophile gang were convicted but so many of their victims were.

One doesn’t have to be a genius to conclude that the financial mismanagement of the Council and indeed overt theft by people in Clwyd County Council was being overlooked by a Welsh Office who rewarded them with millions in ‘grant aid’ – as long as the criminals in that Council’s ‘children’s services’ continued to supply the fresh meat to the Westminster Paedophile Ring…

One of the names mentioned in Hansard was that of the Under-Secretary of State for Wales, Wyn Roberts. Wyn told the Commons how good the prospects of a child born in 1979 would be, such a babe being born under the reign of Queen Maggie. Unless of course they were taken into care Wyn or found themselves in need of a mental health service… In Feb 1984 Wyn Roberts was plain old Mr. He soon became Sir and eventually became Lord. No-one in north Wales ever understood why Wyn Roberts was thought so highly of that he ended up in the Lords – particularly as he never made it to Secretary of State. It’s not as if he ever addressed the problems of the mental health services that constituents like me took to him. He never even raised concerns about the paedophile gang! Ah – I think I understand…

Another name that I recognised popped up in Hansard as well. Edwardes told the House that the Kidney Research Unit for Wales Foundation and the private sector had been invited to submit tenders alongside NHS proposals for the NHS to operate two proposed dialysis units, one in Carmarthen and one at Ysbyty Gwynedd in Bangor. The schemes for these units were to be evaluated by one Professor William Asscher, Professor of Renal Medicine at the University of Cardiff Medical School. William Asscher approved the unit for Ysbyty Gwynedd and shortly afterwards landed a senior position in St George’s Hospital Medical School – where I was hounded out of a job in 1991 at the same time as psychiatrists from St George’s Hospital Medical School colluded with psychiatrists in north Wales to have me labelled as ‘dangerous’, although the St George’s psychiatrists were aware that psychiatrists in north Wales were sexually exploiting patients and were involved in criminal activities. One source of information regarding my dangerousness was Lucille Hughes, the Director of Gwynedd Social Services who was later named in the Waterhouse Report as knowing that a paedophile ring was operating in the social services but not acting on that knowledge. Lucille was the mistress of Dr Dafydd Alun Jones – one of the psychiatrists who was sexually exploiting patients, breaking the law and telling St George’s that I was dangerous! The other psychiatrist from north Wales who told St George’s how dangerous I was, was Dr Tony Francis (Dr X). He was a graduate of Cardiff Medical School, had spent a number of years working there post-qualification and worked at Ysbyty Gwynedd whilst William Asscher gave the go-ahead for the renal unit. My post ‘Running The Country – And All That Jazz’ explains how St George’s Hospital was a foundation that had originally been established by a donation from the Duke of Westminster. In the 1980s, the then Duke of Westminster was the president of the City of Chester Conservative Association. The fact that their MP Peter Morrison was molesting children was openly gossiped about among members of the Association (see post ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’). It’s a small world – especially if there’s a paedophile ring which is part of an organised criminal gang with international connections supplying children to Westminster figures that needs concealing…

It is noticeable that the areas of Wales that were suffering so much under Edwardes – represented by some of the angry MPs who were trying to make him understand the damage that his Gov’t was doing – are the areas of Wales that remain wrecked today and are still the subject of regular political discussions regarding the disadvantage found in the communities within them.

Yesterday the Daily Post Online ran a feature on a local hero – a Top Doctor from Denbighshire, Professor Bim Bhowmick. Bim was described as being 77 years old with a ‘long and successful career behind him’. It was mentioned that Bim was a geriatrician and former Medical Director of Ysbyty Glan Clwyd. Not only is Ysbyty Glan Clwyd as mismanaged and as riddled with corruption as Ysbyty Gwynedd, but the wards for the elderly have been notorious for years. They are so bad that staff working at YGC warn friends not to allow their relatives to be admitted there. It was the ‘institutional abuse’ of elderly mentally ill patients in Tawel Fan ward in YGC that caused the Welsh Gov’t to place the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board in special measures. Patients were crawling around naked on floors covered in urine and faeces whilst staff swore at them and discussed their sex lives. One patient was found to have a broken arm. It transpired that a nurse had previously raised concerns about conditions on the ward, but had been confronted by a doctor saying that he ‘didn’t want any more complaints’. The case of Tawel Fan was the biggest scandal involving care of the elderly that there has been for many years and the ward has been shut down. The nurse who eventually blew the whistle was sacked. No member of staff involved in abusing the patients has been disciplined or prosecuted.

Perhaps standards of elderly care at YGC have simply slipped since Bim was put out to grass? Not really. My post ‘How Much Do Staff Surveys Really Tell Us?’ details how some years ago a retired professor from Bangor University, Clare Wenger, was so horrified at what she witnessed when she was admitted to a ward for the elderly at YGC that she wrote a detailed report noting every incident of abuse and neglect and sent it to over 100 academic contacts and NHS officials. Clare Wenger was denounced as a stuck up cow doing down our wonderful NHS. Clare Wenger’s specialism was the care and support of elderly people. Unlike Bim she didn’t work at YGC so didn’t need to lie about conditions there. Furthermore Clare Wenger actually has a track record of high calibre academic research which Bim, for all his ‘long and successful career’, doesn’t seem to have.

In spite of being Medical Director of the worst geriatric services in north Wales – and probably in the whole of Wales – Bim tells a good story and has managed to do alright for himself.

Bim came from a wealthy family in Bengal but left during the troubled time of partition in India. Bim’s family were targeted because they were wealthy and Bim left India before the rest of his family. Bim’s father’s parting words to him were – when Bim was 6 years old – ‘be a good doctor’. When Bim grew up he lived his father’s dream and studied medicine – Bim had to ‘beg’ a friend of his father’s to pay his fees. Bim triumphed and qualified. In 1969 Bim arrived in the UK. A BBC News Online report from July 2006 tells us that in 1974 Bim decided to settle in north Wales and worked as a consultant at HM Stanley Hospital St Asaph. Somehow, although Bim’s a geriatrician, ‘as a young doctor he developed a special interest in stroke care and progressed to become one of Britain’s foremost experts’ and ‘in 1989 he established a stroke rehab unit as YGC’. This is as puzzling as Bim’s expertise in gerontology. Stroke care in Wales as a whole was so bad that some years ago the Welsh Assembly Gov’t imported some stroke specialists from England in order to build a service for Wales. Stroke care in north Wales was the worst of the lot – there was no specialist service. One of the English imports got into a spat with someone because he was unable to deliver a service in Welsh and in his defence commented that ‘at present a service in Japanese would be an improvement because there is no service’. Stroke patients in north Wales had some of the worst outcomes in the UK – they were dropping like flies because they weren’t getting treatment soon enough. In a lot of cases no-one had even diagnosed them correctly.

I am wondering if Bim is rather like Dr Dafydd Alun Jones who told the local newspapers that he was ‘Europe’s leading forensic psychiatrist’ when he wasn’t even a forensic psychiatrist.

For some reason, after excelling in north Wales, in 2006 Bim departed for Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust where he became Clinical Director of Torfaen Intermediate Care Services. Bim retired in 2009.

Bim really did reach the dizziest of heights however. In 2003 Cardiff University offered him a Chair and a Fellowship. He was also offered a Fellowship by Glyndwr University. In 2009 he was given a Lifetime Achievement award from NHS Wales. He was a runner up for the Bevan Prize for his outstanding contribution to the health and wellbeing of the elderly. In 2000 he was awarded an OBE for his contribution to elderly care services in Wales. Bim won the Founder’s Medal from the British Geriatrics Society in 2005.

Bim is now Emeritus Consultant Physician for the elderly in YGC as well as Clinical Director of Medicine and Associate Postgraduate Dean, Wales. He helped initiate and Chairs the Equality and Diversity Committee of the Royal College of Physicians.

Bim is a Board Member of the Bevan Commission, which is dedicated to ‘promoting health and health services in Wales’. The Bevan Commission informs us that he has been ‘delivering excellence and innovation in geriatric medicine within the NHS for over 48 years’. So that’s why geriatric care is usually so shite and why geriatrics is the least desirable speciality among medical graduates.

Bim has even invented a model of care – and has called it after himself. It’s the BIM – the Bhowmick Innovative Model, bringing acute medical care to elderly patients in their own homes. It reduces bed blocking and introduces significant savings. It’s also a very well-kept secret, because the last I heard there was a crisis in the care of elderly people at home. Nonetheless Bim won the UK BUPA ‘charity’ medical research prize and was a finalist in the BMJ awards.

In Oct 2015 Bim gave a public lecture as part of a programme organised by Bangor University, Grwp Llandrillo Menai and supported by Public Health Service Wales: ‘The Elderly In Illness: Hospital Or Home Treatment With Dignity’. Well they certainly got that in Tawel Fan – as did Clare Wenger when she was given an enema on an open ward in Ysbyty Glan Clwyd whilst she was on the receiving end of a bit of Bim’s excellence.

Bim is of course a governor of Glyndwr University and a former Deputy Lieutenant of Clwyd. Bim wrote his autobiography a few years ago, ‘You Can’t Climb A Ladder With Your Hands In Your Pockets’. He seems to have climbed one by telling a lot of tall stories and relied on no-one daring to expose him because that would involve admitting the dreadful truth about standards of care at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd.

I came across another interesting document today. It dated from 2004 and was a list of the most senior Freemasons in the UK. There have been of course constant allegations that the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal was connected with Masonic activity, although this was denied in the Waterhouse Report and then denied again by Secretary of State for Wales Stephen Crabb after the Macur Review. The rumours persist though – I was told by somebody in MIND in 1987 that the problems caused by Dafydd and co in the mental health services involved Freemasonry and it was admitted that Gordon Anglesea was a Freemason as were a number of the judges and lawyers who have been involved in the inquiries, investigations and trials connected with the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal. St George’s Hospital was known to be dominated by Freemasons. Bangor University had it’s own lodge. The lodge in the town of Bangor had a number of police officers and lawyers as members.

So when I found the list of Masons today, I paid close attention to see if I recognised any names from north Wales lodges. I did. An R. Hefin Davies MBE was listed – that is the former Chair of the North West Wales NHS Trust. Out of interest I then searched the Company Director’s register for Hefin Davies’s interests. He has been a director of a number of companies, three of them involved with the slate trade in north Wales. Being a director of companies involved with the slate industry might at first seem a little incompatible with being the Chair of an NHS Trust. But it’s interesting in the light of something that I was told some years ago when I lived near Bethesda. The Penrhyn Slate Quarry is situated near Bethesda and a lot of my former neighbours used to work there or have friends who worked there. There were always a lot of allegations that massive fiddles were being conducted on the part of some of the senior people in the quarry. Eventually I think it was three people who were put on trial for offences like fraud and theft. It wasn’t just a bit of pilfering that had gone on, the people involved were fleecing the quarry in a major way. There was one man who was caught and arrested however who was never charged. This was widely discussed in the village in terms of ‘how the hell has he got away with it when the others are in court’. The man concerned had been driving lorry loads of slate out of the quarry without going over the weigh bridge, he’d been stealing tons of the stuff. After everyone marvelled at no prosecution ever being brought, I was told by someone ‘not only that but he’s now just been given a seat on the Board of the North West Wales NHS Trust’. Hefin was Chairman at the time. Hefin was also Chairman when Ysbyty Gwynedd were slaughtering mental health patients and the staff were perjuring themselves in order to secure criminal convictions against patients who made complaint.

Another name on the list of senior Freemasons in north Wales was that of the Rev Canon Trevor Davies of Colwyn Bay. Another name was Gareth Lloyd Jones, a funeral director in Llanwrst. The Masons obviously do put a bit of business each others way, because Gareth Lloyd Jones organised the funeral of the Provincial Grand Master of North Wales 1990-2004, one Ian Lawrie Mackeson-Sandbach, who died in 2012. When Ian died, donations to the King Edward VII Hospital were requested. I presume that this is the same King Edward VII Hospital mentioned in my post ‘Update On Tainted Blood Scandal – The Culprit’, the hospital with Lord Simon Glenarthur as governor (who is also the Director of the MDU), the Conservative peer who was responsible for the tainted blood scandal which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. Ian’s mother Geraldine – who died in 2001 – was a descendant of the 2nd Baron Penrhyn. Geraldine inherited a Jamaican plantation of 4000 acres and two sizeable estates in north Wales. Geraldine was President of the Denbigh branch of the Royal College of Midwives 1955-75; a member of the governing body of the Church in Wales 1957-67; President of the Royal British Legion Women’s Section; a Magistrate on the Llanwrst Bench 1942-79 and was President of the Juvenile Bench.

So Geraldine and Ian seem to have some medical connections then, as well as a few other connections. The family estate is in the Conwy Valley near Llanwrst. So the Mackeson-Sandbachs could well know Peter Higson, Chair of the Betsi Board – he comes from Llanwrst and his sister is Ruth Hussey, the former Chief Medical Officer for Wales! Geraldine could well have known Dafydd and Gwynne the lobotomist too, with that medical connection to Denbigh – of course Peter Higson worked with Dafydd and Gwynne himself when he was a psychologist and then the manager at the North Wales Hospital Denbigh, throughout the years when Dafydd was banging up people who’d complained about the paedophiles’ friends. One of Dafydd’s roles at Denbigh was to ‘assess’ pregnant women who had requested terminations on mental health grounds. The North Wales Hospital was an institution in which female patients were sexually exploited by Dafydd himself, in which unmarried mothers were still incarcerated in the 1980s and in which whilst I was there in 1987 was unlawfully detaining a young woman who had been abducted by three men, held in an attic and sexually assaulted (see post ‘The Distressed Young Woman Who Vanished’). They would have needed a colluding midwife on quite a regular basis wouldn’t they.

Geraldine’s granddaughter – Ian’s daughter – is famous! She’s Antoinette Sandbach, the former Conservative AM for north Wales. Antoinette always used to describe herself as being a ‘farmer’s daughter’. I didn’t quite believe her at the time. The farmer’s daughter always stressed how committed she was to north Wales, particularly of course to the farmers in the region. So imagine my surprise when in 2015 she stood for the safe Tory seat of Eddisbury in Cheshire. She won as well and the next day resigned her seat in the Assembly and now she’s buggered off to Cheshire.

In July 2013 Cheshire Life interviewed Antoinette. It transpires that the farmer’s daughter spent 12 years in London working as a ‘successful criminal barrister’. Cheshire Life asked her why she would ever want to leave such a career for the ‘country roads’ of north Wales and then ‘head for the Assembly’. Antoinette explained that after she gave a speech at a Save the Rhino fundraiser in 2007, a number of people suggested that she entered politics (I don’t quite follow, but never mind). So Antoinette rang the Conservative Office in Colwyn Bay – that’s the office of a former star of this blog, David Jones MP, who was Secretary of State for Wales for a while under Cameron – and within three months Antoinette found herself standing for the Assembly in Delyn! She didn’t win that seat, so she then ‘worked on the family farm for a low wage’ whilst at the same time working part-time for David Jones, putting her legal skills to good use (Jones is a solicitor). Then Antoinette’s name was added to the regional list and she was subsequently elected!

My post ‘The Right Honourable David Jones MP’ details the many connections that David Jones has to the paedophiles’ friends. Like Antoinette, Jones initially entered politics via a seat in the Welsh Assembly – like Antoinette, he then legged it to Westminster at the first opportunity. David Cameron appointed David Jones to the position of Secretary of State for Wales in the months before Cameron announced that there was to be a review of the Waterhouse Inquiry in the aftermath of the constant allegations that Waterhouse was a huge cover-up. So Jones was Secretary of State whilst the discussions as to how to respond to the accusations of a massive, high level cover up of a paedophile ring involving Westminster figures were happening among Cameron’s inner circle. Jones was removed from the post once the Macur Review was well underway. Like Antoinette’s dad, David Jones is a Freemason.

Antoinette’s dad was Provincial Grand Master of North Wales throughout the police inquiries into child abuse in the region – which were alleged to have been hampered by Freemasonry – throughout the Jillings investigation into child abuse (which the police refused to co-operate with) and throughout the Waterhouse Inquiry. Whilst Antoinette’s dad was Provincial Grand Master, witnesses to the activities of the paedophile gang were found dead, the arson attack which killed five people connected to the North Wales Paedophile Ring happened and Gordon Anglesea won his libel case and the young man who gave evidence against him was subsequently found dead. Oh and I and two of my friends who knew what had happened to me at the hands of Dafydd et al were subjected to constant harassment and threats, unlawfully dismissed from various jobs, one of us was subjected to a violent assault and there were two attempts to set fire to my house.

When Cheshire Life interviewed Antoinette she explained that she became a barrister because she wanted to ‘represent those whose voices would otherwise be lost, whether a victim of crime or a wrongly accused defendant’. As a result of the activities of a number of people that your dad knew Antoinette, very many people were victims of crime and wrongly accused defendants. So would you like to explain to us why the ‘farmer’s daughter’ suddenly decided to enter politics in 2007 – because I don’t for one minute believe that it was anything to do with your outstanding performance at the Save the Rhino Society, or your desire to ‘learn about farming’. You had decided that you needed to be in Westminster and your network of Freemasons, lawyers and paedophiles’ friends swung into action immediately.

In 2009 Antoinette’s young baby died. She has talked extensively about how distressing it was, how she was treated as a suspect by the police and how little support there is for parents of babies who die. She made speeches about it in both the Senedd and the Commons and wept buckets as she spoke, invoking applause on both occasions. She now campaigns on that issue. Yet she has never spoken a word about the dreadful state of the NHS in north Wales, even about the maternity services at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd which were so dysfunctional that Bangor University removed their students from midwifery placements there and a hit squad was sent in from the Welsh Gov’t with the aim of ‘achieving normality’. Numerous women had the most distressing experiences there and some lost their babies.

My post ‘A Vampire At Glyndwr University!’ explains how in 2008 a substantial number of the paedophiles’ friends – in their attempt to have Edwina Hart removed from her post as Health Minister as she tried to clean up the NHS in north Wales – submitted ‘evidence’ to the Welsh Affairs Committee in the Commons. When I wrote that post I was wondering who was on that Committee because I suspected that the paedophiles’ friends were appealing to a sympathiser. I found out today that David Jones was on that Committee. The paedophiles’ friends sent up their distress flare just at the time that the farmer’s daughter decided that a lucrative career at the Criminal Bar (so to speak) was not for her and what she really wanted out of life was a ‘low paid job’ learning how to muck out the stock. Which is why she also bagged a job with a friend of the paedophiles’ friends, moved to Cheshire and has a seat in Westminster.

Two more pieces of news from BBC News Wales Online. David Boswell, 56, the Mayor of Pembroke and a Conservative County Councillor, has been charged with historical sex offences – six counts of indecent assault and one count of rape on two different victims who were both aged under 13 at the time. Mr Boswell was in the Army for more than twelve years and is a Marshall for the Royal British Legion.

It has also been reported that the long running saga of the Chief Exec of Community Health Councils in Wales who was suspended on full pay (£90k pa) for many months without anyone knowing the reason (see post ‘High-Level Shenanigans At The Community Health Councils’) is over. He has now been sacked without anyone knowing the reason. When he was appointed to the post he indicated that he wanted to shake up the CHCs and ensure that they represented a strong voice on the part of patients. Which they certainly didn’t before – in the north Wales CHC most of the members were retired or even still working Top Doctors or the paedophiles’ friends. The day after the sacking without reason of the Chief Exec was reported, there was a bad news story of dissatisfied patients of the Kinmel Bay Medical Practice having to queue up outside the surgery at 8am in order to book an appointment. Geoff Ryall-Harvey the Chief Officer of the North Wales CHC said that it was ‘totally unacceptable’, a ‘longstanding problem’ and that ‘we’d be happy to take on anyone’s complaint concerning this matter’. If it’s a longstanding problem the CHC obviously haven’t been very successful at dealing with it. But then they failed to deal with a genocidal mental health service and an unhinged dangerous maternity service and as a result the Betsi Board virtually collapsed and is in long-term special measures. At least they’ve now sacked the man who wanted to effect change.

I’ve just been doing a bit of browsing and of course I’ve discovered yet more skulduggery regarding Waterhouse and the Macur Review. On March 17 2016 Stephen Crabb, the Secretary of State for Wales, made a statement in the Commons on the publication of the Macur Review. Crabb stated that when the Welsh Office was disbanded in 1999 – how convenient that the Whitehall Dept responsible for covering up the activities of the paedophile gang was disbanded just before the Waterhouse Report was published, just as Clwyd County Council was dissolved in 1996 the minute that the Jillings Report was submitted – ‘the files that it held on newly dissolved issues such as social care and children’s services were transferred to the National Assembly of Wales. This included the Waterhouse computer database. When Lady Justice Macur requested this, it was found that in 2008 the Welsh Government IT contractors had declared that it’s contents were ‘corrupted and unreadable’ and they had therefore been destroyed. She finds that it was an ‘innocent mistake, rather than a calculated ploy’.

So a load more crucial evidence relating to the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal has been destroyed and yet again, there is nothing suspicious about it at all. Just as the warehouse fire that destroyed all the Bryn Alyn records as Ronnie began his Inquiry prevented anyone from tracing all the children who passed through Bryn Alyn. That was one hell of a bonfire as well – some houses nearby were destroyed as well, so intense was the heat.

I note that after Crabb made his statement, Albert Owen the Labour MP for Ynys Mon spoke and mentioned that he had encountered constituents having difficulty obtaining their records, especially from the Gwynedd Authority.

It’s just as well that I’m storing my own 10,000 documents then isn’t it. (I’ve made copies too in case of non-suspicious outbursts of fire.) Particularly as Gary Doherty, the CEO of the Betsi is claiming that most of these documents don’t actually exist.

The title of this post is a quote that can be found on the online profile of Timothy Cray. Who he? Timothy Cray is the barrister who acted for Henry Hendron – a barrister himself – who ended up receiving much media coverage in 2016 as a result of the ‘chemsex trial’. Hendron is a barrister in his mid-thirties who was arrested and charged after his 18 year old Columbian boyfriend was found dead at their flat after Hendron had supplied him with chemsex drugs. I will return to this case later. But first I want to discuss a friend of Hendron’s, whom Hendron himself had previously provided with legal advice – Nigel Evans.

Nigel Evans is the Tory MP for Ribble Valley who in 2014 stood trial for a series of assaults on seven men. Evans was acquitted of all charges – one rape, five sexual assaults, one attempted sexual assault and two indecent assaults. So Nigel Evans was somehow either accused quite wrongly by a series of people independently of each other of very serious offences – or he had a very good barrister, obviously yet another safe pair of hands at the Criminal Bar. The circumstances of the alleged offences were all rather similar – they were committed by Evans, a senior Tory in his mid-50s, against much younger men who were working in Westminster or aspiring to do so, after sessions of very heavy drinking by Evans. Following Evans’s acquittal there was an enormous outpouring of support and sympathy for Evans from his fellow politicians and not just from Tories. Evans waxed lyrical about his ordeal and described in detail his distress at being charged and his colleagues rallied round stressing what a lovely bloke he was. Stephen Crabb, the Conservative MP for Preseli in Pembrokeshire, tweeted that his ‘friend’ Evans was ‘a good man’ and Ann Widdecombe – not known for her sympathy towards promiscuous gay sex when blind drunk – described Evans as a ‘truthful, considerate and kind individual’.

Now when Evans was arrested he was known as an MP representing a constituency in the north of England. But I knew of Evans as a rather unusual man, a Thatcherite Tory who actually came from Wales. Evans grew up in Swansea where his family ran a small business, went to Swansea University and only became the MP for Ribble Valley in 1992 after unsuccessfully contesting seats in south Wales. Before he was an MP Evans was a County Councillor in West Glamorgan (elected in 1985) and in 1990 became deputy Tory leader of that Council. He stood down as a Councillor in 1991.

In 1993 Evans became PPS to David Hunt, the Secretary of State for Employment and he remained Hunt’s PPS when Hunt was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1994. Readers will remember that David Hunt was Secretary of State for Wales on two occasions, between 1990-93 and again for just one month in the summer of 1995. Hunt was in that post when there was a total failure by the Welsh Office to respond to the serious abuse that was rife in children’s homes in north Wales or to the abuses that were happening in the north Wales mental health services. The Welsh Office knew about these matters and actively concealed everything. In 1995 Evans became PPS to Tony Baldry, Minister of State at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. Then in 1996 Evans was appointed PPS to William Hague when he was appointed Secretary of State for Wales by John Major. William Hague’s biggest task in that post was of course arranging the public inquiry into child abuse in north Wales. Previous posts have detailed the many reasons why I think someone worked very hard at selecting those who were involved with the Waterhouse Inquiry. As Hague’s PPS, Evans will have been deeply involved in the leg work relating to that Inquiry – and Evans knew Wales very well indeed, even if Hague didn’t. Hague is a very able man and would soon have been able to research everything that is officially on record about Wales, but Evans will have known what it is really important to know and what you only find out by living and working in Wales – the gossip and the lowdown.

So Evans was involved in the most enormous cover-up of organised child abuse in Wales – child abuse that involved under-aged boys ‘in care’ being sexually molested by older men, including it would seem at least one senior Tory, Sir Peter Morrison, Thatcher’s PPS and deputy Chairman of the Party. Some of the boys giving evidence to Waterhouse maintained that they were taken to other locations where they had sex with multiple older men unknown to them. John Allen, who owned and managed the Bryn Alyn Community, a collection of children’s homes where some of the worst abuse took place, is currently serving a life sentence for abusing boys in his care. Waterhouse described John Allen as ‘kind’ and ‘generous’ as a result of John Allen buying presents and giving money to boys whom he was having sex with. Allen owned what Waterhouse called ‘unsuitable accommodation’ in London and Brighton in which some boys lived after they left children’s homes in north Wales. The boys themselves claimed that Allen owned brothels in London and Brighton and some of them worked in those brothels after they left ‘care’.

Evans could well have heard about some of this before he worked for Hague as a result of coming from Wales and being involved in local politics there, although he never mentioned it. But Evans didn’t mention something else either and he didn’t mention it until 2010. That he was gay. Not only did Evans not mention that he was gay, but he actively concealed it and states himself that he pretended to be a ‘red blooded’ heterosexual lest being openly gay damaged his political prospects in a party that was perceived as being highly homophobic in the wake of passing Section 28 in the late 1980s. Evans even voted against reducing the age of consent for gay men in 1994 and again on two following occasions. (I also seem to remember Evans appearing on a TV show arguing against reducing the age of consent for gays in 1994.) Evans also ensured that he was absent from the Commons vote on civil partnerships, he missed three votes on gay adoption and in one vote he opposed the move. In 1993 a piece appeared in ‘Private Eye’ claiming that Evans had been seen ‘canoodling’ with a young man. Evans personally phoned Ian Hislop to deny the story, although the Eye never published a retraction or an apology.

Evans came out as gay to the press in 2010 claiming that he was sick of living a lie. But he only did so after a Labour MP threatened to out him. After he came out as gay Evans constructed himself as some sort of gay rights champ for Westminster and stressed how many gay politicians there were, many of whom had not yet publicly admitted it. He also said that when he first entered Parliament he had known of loads of gay politicians who were concealing it. Evans formed an LGBT networking group in Westminster, Parliout. In the light of what was revealed during and after Evans’s trial, I would have thought that it was fairly obvious that there wasn’t any need for Parliout, Evans and others seemed to have already established a gay network at Westminster.

Young male parliamentary workers who gave evidence at Evans’s trial described how they were groped or kissed by Evans after getting completely bladdered with him in bars at the House of Commons or in Soho. Allegations then emerged in the press of a heavy drinking culture at Westminster – I had heard that from a friend years ago. But the revelations in the media became increasingly more sordid. It wasn’t just excessive drinking that was commonplace – it was alleged that there was a big problem with senior politicians expecting sexual favours from wannabes and if wannabes were unhappy with this there was no effective redress. Supplying sexual favours would ensure that your career advanced but complaining would bring it to a rapid halt. After Evans was acquitted, much was made of some of the witnesses saying in court that they had not wanted the case against Evans to go ahead, that they didn’t feel like victims and one of them claimed that after getting pissed with Evans and finding Evans’s hand down his trousers it was just a case of ‘crazy crazy Westminster’. (Why don’t women want to be politicians? Ooh it’s because they all have low self esteem and need role models like Harriet! It cannot possibly be because they do not regularly get bladdered and participate in mutual groping sessions with tosspots. Except to be fair, some of them do, a Lib Dem who believes that she’s broken the glass ceiling in Wales comes to mind.) Evans’s defence was considered to have been given a considerable boost when the judge, Justice Timothy King, instructed the jury to find Evans not guilty on one alleged offence. There was a major attempt to construct Nigel Evans’s activities as the high drunken jinks of a harmless gregarious man who had been hung out to dry by the police and the CPS. His excessive drinking was explained as the result of him having difficulty ‘coming to terms with his sexuality’ and of course the death of his dear old mum who had no idea that he was gay. Evans continued the misery memoir by explaining that the one sadness in his life was that he had never had a regular boyfriend. One suspects that Nigel Evans’s lifestyle would mitigate against a regular relationship.

There was however one witness at the trial who did not claim that he had no problem with Evans’s harmless drunken groping. That was the 22 year old man who claimed that Evans had raped him. Evans’s account was that he and this young man had participated in consensual sex ‘in a number of different positions’. The young man – who gave evidence from behind a screen and was described as ‘nervous’ and ‘whispering’ – had been a university student at the time of the incident, had stayed at Evans’s house and had maintained that he woke up to find Evans on top of him. Media accounts stressed how this young man ‘wasn’t believed’. He’s not going to have a career in politics now is he – but those spoke fondly of Evans in court and who never wanted the case against him to go ahead will still be in with a chance.

The way in which the police came to hear about the allegations against Evans is significant. One young man, a politics student, had been befriended by Evans in 2008 on Facebook. This student was later described as ‘ruthlessly ambitious’. (Just like Evans had been when he was a young man.) This man alleged that he had stayed at Evans’s house overnight in 2009 and that Evans had ‘groped his penis’. The young man told of his encounter with Evans to Adam Price (Plaid), Michael Fabricant (Conservative) and Iain Corby (a Tory policy boss). A few days later he recounted the story to the then Tory Chief Whip Patrick McLoughlin and his deputy John Randall. The student had wanted Evans to resign, which was described by McLoughlin as a ‘big ask’. Patrick McLoughlin is now Sir Patrick and in July 2016 was appointed Chairman of the Conservative Party. Randall is an MP for Derbyshire – he was elected to Matthew Parris’s seat when Parris stood down in 1986. The Matthew Parris who wrote about having sex with boys who ‘were always willing’ along with his political friends when on holiday. McLoughlin is also Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. John Randall has also been knighted but stood down from Parliament in 2015. He is now a Trustee and Vice-Chair of the Human Trafficking Foundation – a man who was unable to respond when he was told of an allegation of sexual assault perpetrated by someone who had previously been involved in a cover-up of the sexual abuse and trafficking into prostitution of children in care. The allegations against Evans went no further – until the student told Dr Sarah Woolaston, Tory MP for Totnes. A friend of this student then revealed to him that he too had been assaulted by Evans and so he contacted Sara Woolaston. Woolaston contacted John Bercow the Speaker, who said that it was for the two young men to go to the police. But then after receiving legal advice from the Speaker’s Counsel, Michael Carpenter, Bercow’s secretary told Sarah Woolaston that the Speaker ‘cannot handle this’. Sarah Woolaston is a Top Doctor who claims experience in dealing with matters of sexual abuse and readers will guess that under most circumstances I would roll about laughing at the notion that a Top Doctor might actually know how to conduct themselves in such a situation, but to Sarah’s credit, she seems to have been the only person who had engaged her brain. Frustrated by the response from the Speaker’s office, she told the two young men that they had a responsibility to report Evans to the police because there was no telling whom he was going to do this to next and gave them a police number. Sarah also in 2013 brought the allegations to the attention of the Palace of Westminster Police. So that’s how the ball started rolling.

Yesterday’s post ‘A Future Leader Of The Labour Party’ described how over decades the CPS have worked very hard at not prosecuting people involved with the sexual abuse of young people, particularly if there are connections to political figures. It was of course the CPS who bit the bullet in the case of Nigel Evans and prosecuted. They certainly had a lot of shit thrown at them for daring to do this after his acquittal. Evans’s case was categorised with the cases of two Coronation Street actors, Michael Le Vell and Ken Roache, who had also been acquitted of sex offences. Although the cases of Le Vell and Roache were very different from Evans, Evans and his supporters discussed the three cases as if they were all very similar, ie. people making claims for which there was no evidence against public figures. Vicky Entwhistle, an actor from Coronation Street, appeared in public at Evans’s trial to support him. Not that the actors in Coronation Street have proved themselves to be particularly good judges of character – John Stalker’s book boasts of how he hung out with the Coronation Street crowd and William Roache is a former Patron of St David’s Hospice Llandudno, which seems to act a repository for disgraced NHS staff from north Wales who either left their jobs under a cloud or concealed the paedophile ring (see posts ‘The CEOs Of St David’s Hospice’ and ‘Don’t Be Silly, He’s Nice’). In the wake of all this, the Attorney General Dominic Grieve demanded an explanation from DPP Alison Saunders why Evans’s prosecution had gone ahead, even though Saunders hadn’t been DPP when the decision to prosecute had been made. Saunders track record suggests that she never would have prosecuted Evans. I note that when Evans was prosecuted Saunders was actually working for the CPS as the regional case manager in London. Which explains an awful lot – sex offences against young people aren’t only committed in north Wales and a lot of high profile and powerful people live in London. Jack Straw also had a go at the CPS, suggesting that the DPP might be more cautious in bringing high profile sex offence cases in the future – the Jack who was years ago a Councillor in Islington Council when it’s children’s homes had been infiltrated by paedophiles, the Jack who was a leading light in New Labour which was so hopelessly compromised because of ignoring the institutionalised sexual abuse of children (see post ‘The London Connection’).

Evans angrily told the media that he had spent his life savings – £130,000 – on his legal fees and he demanded that the CPS repay him. Which was deeply ironic because the legislation that caused Evans to cough up in his particular circumstances was passed by the Coalition Gov’t of whom the Tories were the leading partners. Evans also had the support of an incredibly powerful man in the Commons, who constantly ends up in scandals himself – dear old Keith Vaz, then Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, who considered holding a separate inquiry into the prosecution of Evans. I have a friend who often expresses at length her amazement at what Keith Vaz has got away with – the expense scandals, the constant conflicts of interest or failure to declare interests, the failure to declare payments, the business of the passports and the Hinduja brothers, his narrow escape from being prosecuted by Leicestershire Police after making false allegations against a former police officer, his leading a march through Leicester demanding the banning of ‘The Satanic Verses’ after a fatwa had been issued against Salman Rushdie and much more. In Sept 2016 Vaz resigned as Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee after he was caught in a tabloid gay prostitution and cocaine expose. One month later he was appointed to the Justice Select Committee. My mate keeps asking me how he does it particularly as no-one seems to like him or trust him.

So how did Keith Vaz, a senior solicitor to Islington Council in the mid 80s (when Islington Council’s children’s homes were rife with paedophiles whilst the Council was stuffed full of Councillors who would later become some of the biggest figures in the New Labour Gov’t), then a solicitor in a Leicester Council funded law centre between 1985-87 (when Frank Beck, a Leicester social worker was abusing kids in care in Leicester along with it seems Greville Janner, Labour MP for Leicester West until he was elevated to the Lords in 1990) ever get himself so well thought of in the Labour Party that he was selected as candidate for Leicester East? Could it have been the support from his mother, who was a Labour Councillor on Leicester City Council for 14 years, from the point at which Keith was selected as a candidate? Or could it have been that a lot of people were very grateful to him for something? He continued to impress once he was elected to the Commons. By 1997 Vaz was PPs to the Attorney General John Morris – the John Morris who was Secretary of State for Wales when children in children’s homes in north Wales were being abused and trafficked by paedophiles, the John Morris whose constituency is in West Glamorgan, Nigel Evans’s old stomping ground – and between May-Oct 1999 Vaz was PPS to the Lord Chancellor’s Dept, the Lord Chancellor being Blair’s mate Lord Goldsmith. Vaz just went onwards and upwards. Surely there’s a clue somewhere in that CV as to the root of his Teflon qualities…

As in the case of Vaz, I suspect that the overwhelming ‘popularity’ of Nigel Evans is Parliament speak for ‘a lot of us are very grateful to him for something’. He was welcomed back into the Commons after his acquittal – although it transpired that a lot of his constituents in the Ribble Valley had been expressing concerns for some time about Nigel’s activities.

Whilst Evans and Hague were helping everyone out of a tight spot by employing the talents of Ronnie Waterhouse and co, there was of course a change of Gov’t. In 1997, during the Waterhouse Inquiry, Blair won the election. Blair chose to axe the post of Welsh Secretary from the Cabinet, a decision that Evans opposed. This morning I found a photo of Nigel carrying a spoof ‘Tony Blair Estate Agents’ placard, emblazoned with the slogan ‘Wales Office For Sale’. Indeed the Welsh Office had been for sale for years – the whole lot of them sold themselves to a paedophile gang and a bunch of criminals who worked in the health and welfare services as documents in my possession demonstrate. Although the Tories didn’t have any seats in Wales after the 97 General Election, John Major put Evans on his shadow frontbench as spokesman for Welsh Affairs. Evans was obviously a man who could be relied upon. When Duncan Smith became Tory leader, Evans was a member of the shadow cabinet and between 2001-2003 was shadow Secretary of State for Wales. Evans returned to the backbenches on principle (is this a man who has any principles?) when Michael Howard became leader and took the role of shadow Secretary of State for Wales outside of the shadow cabinet. Evans remained a member of the Trade and Industry and the Welsh Affairs Select Committees in 2003. In Nov 2004 he became Vice-Chair of the Conservative Party, with specific responsibility for overseeing Conservatives Abroad. With Cameron’s election in 2005 Evans returned to the backbenches. He was one of the Speaker’s three deputies until he resigned after being arrested in 2013. Although Nigel was very cross when his own party’s changes to legal aid hit him in his own pocket, Nigel isn’t too keen on other people keeping afloat financially. He voted against the introduction of the National Minimum Wage in 1999 and voted against every increase afterwards. In 2009 he was one of 11 MPs to back the Employment Opportunities Bill, which aimed to make the minimum wage optional. Presumably Nigel’s idea of employment opportunities is to sell one’s body to predatory older politicians and indeed many young people who were kids in care in north Wales in the 70s, 80s and 90s were trained or forced to do this. But what are they supposed to do for a living when they’re too old for politicians to be interested in them?

Although Parliament opened it’s heart to Nigel throughout the trial and afterwards, I would have thought that as in the case of Ken Dodd and the allegations of tax evasion, the evidence against Nigel was quite substantial. So I did what I enjoy doing in such cases, I did a bit of reading regarding the barristers and judge involved. The judge was Timothy King, who in 2006 had defended the BNP leader Nick Griffin against a charge of inciting racial hatred.

So who acted for Evans? There seems to have been two barristers involved. Evans’s friend the aforementioned Henry Hendron and Peter Wright QC. I’m not sure whether Hendron acted for Evans in a paid capacity, but he did boast about advising him during the trial – I will return to Hendron later. Peter Wright was the name that appeared in the media as Counsel for Evans.

Well Evans certainly didn’t take any risks when he sought advice, Peter Wright knows how to extract people from very deep slurry pits indeed. Wright boasts of having acted in cases of organised crime – including people who have accused of committing organised crime – and people who have been prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive. Peter successfully defended a gang of armed robbers who shot a policewoman dead, a company that ran a care home that was prosecuted by the HSE when an elderly resident died as a result of scalding and a nurse who managed to kill a three week old baby boy whilst performing a circumcision for cultural reasons. He successfully defended a Detective Chief Inspector who was accused of misconduct in public office after leaking the identity of an IRA bomber to a journalist and a senior officer at HM Customs and Excise who was accused of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and misconduct in public office which involved his links to organised crime. One case that must have really made Peter feel good about himself was his defence of someone who petrol bombed a family’s home leading to the death of eight members of the family. But Peter doesn’t just act for your everyday murderous scumbag. No, Peter was Counsel in the LIBOR scandal (now you know why bankers never go to prison even when they cause the global economy to collapse!) and in Operation Elveden (the police investigation into corrupt payments between journalists and public officials, which resulted in the prosecution of Cameron’s mates Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson as well as a few others).

In 2006 Wright was appointed as Senior Treasury Counsel by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith. Wright boasts of being the first person to be directly appointed to this post – so presumably Goldsmith noticed his talents in defending petrol bombers, crooked bankers and Murdoch’s employees and decided that the Gov’t could utilise those talents. In 2010 Wright stood down again as Senior Treasury Counsel – well he had all those bent bankers and press barons to get out of trouble – but he continues to advise the CPS, the Attorney General and the Treasury Solicitor. Which sounds rather like multiple conflicts of interest to me.

So Evans hired the man who had worked for the Gov’t that Evans was part of. But what of Evans’s ‘friend and barrister’ Henry Hendron? We know that everyone loves Evans, even Ann Widdecombe and that poor old Evans only gets rat arsed and gropes people because he misses his mum and didn’t come out as gay when he should have. Evans’s mate Henry has fought personal demons too. Particularly after he was arrested for supplying the drugs that killed his teenaged boyfriend. The Torygraph online published a real tear jerker of an interview with Henry’s brother Richard who was also a barrister (and before that an Inspector with the Metropolitan Police) just before Henry’s trial in 2016. As well as being represented by Timothy Cray, Henry was also being advised by Richard. Richard gave the Torygraph full details of Henry’s downward spiral after his boyfriend had been found dead in his flat. How did Richard know that Henry was grieving? Because Henry ‘binged on drugs’ to mask his grief and attended chemsex parties on a non-stop basis. He collapsed at one such party after overdoing the drugs and was rushed to hospital – this was one week after his boyfriend Miguel’s death. The nation’s widows really don’t know how to grieve properly do they, all they do is rely on the cat for company.

At Henry’s trial he pleaded guilty to two counts of possession with intent to supply. The circumstances were that he purchased £1000 of goodies from a BBC producer called Andrew Parkin with the intention of flogging them to other people at chemsex parties. He gave some to his boyfriend and it killed him and when the police searched his house afterwards they found methodrone and GBL. Parkin was given 200 hours of community service and Hendron 140 hours. (That’s what I got when I was prosecuted for calling a corrupt NHS manager who was assisting in concealing a paedophile ring a fat idiot.) It was revealed at the trial that Hendron had three previous convictions – for drink driving.

Something else came to light among all the publicity around Hendron after his trial. That he had previously been fined £2000 by the Bar Council for professional misconduct. The particulars of the misconduct being that on the eve of the starting date of Nigel Evans’s trial Hendron had described the witnesses due to give evidence against Evans as ‘manipulative and duplicitous’ online. I cannot help wondering what other pressure may have been applied to those witnesses. The media hype concerning Hendron mentioned that his clients included Nadine Dorries and the Earl of Cardigan. A bit of history was dredged up as well – that as a teenager Hendron had appeared at the Tory Party Conference arguing for the reintroduction of corporal punishment. This appearance had resulted in him being tipped as a future leader. He’d be able to add S&M (or in his case probably just S) to his chemsex-drink driving-killing of teenaged boyfriends repertoire.

Prior to his trial Henry worked as a barrister at Strand Chambers and before that at 2 Kings Bench Walk. Between 2006-2008 he worked for the CPS ‘advising senior civil servants and ministerial teams’. Including the Department of Work and Pensions and the Department of Health.

After the trial the NHS and BMA made public statements regarding the major problem that is chemsex. Well if they’re not careful all the other lawyers that they use will be struck off by the Law Society as well after they’ve woken up next to a corpse resulting from the binge the previous night.

Henry himself commented after the trial that he did accept that perhaps he might not be able to work as a barrister again, although one day he hoped to. Meanwhile, he is comforting himself with regular trips to the family of his boyfriend who died – who live in Columbia. I cannot help but wonder whether with Henry’s track record Columbia might hold attractions other than the relatives of his boyfriend. Indeed I was surprised that there were no media comments at the time of Miguel’s death regarding the unlikely domestic set-up of Henry – a barrister with a passion for chemsex whose friends include a senior middle aged Tory who has faced multiple charges of sexual assault on young men, living with a teenager from Columbia who worked as a café assistant.

So how ever did this self-indulgent binging twat with so little regard for the safety of other people end up with community service after he’d managed to kill someone? Could it have been the skills of Timothy Cray, his barrister, one of the safest hands at the Criminal Bar? Cray’s online profile tells us that he has ‘unique knowledge of international organised crime’ and ‘extensive experience of defending in allegations of sexual misconduct with emphasis on sensitive and high profile cases’. Cray acts for the Serious Fraud Office – of course – and in Jan 2014 he was appointed by the Attorney General Dominic Grieve as Senior Treasury Counsel. Because he is of course used to defending criminals who work in the professions with links to Gov’t.

As for the judge who felt that a few boring but not too dreadful hours working in a charity shop or clearing footpaths was going to ensure that Henry mended his ways, that was Richard Marks QC who was appointed a circuit judge at the Old Bailey in 2012 by the Lord Chancellor Ken Clarke. Before this, one of Marks’s responsibilities was as a legal member of the restricted patients panel. Who will have been banged up for a lot less than overdosing their teenaged partners and in many cases won’t have committed any crime at all. In 2015 Marks precipitated a lot of media coverage after he was removed from a trial involving ‘Sun’ journalists who were alleged to have bribed public officials for information. The ‘Sun’ was very angry and maintained that Marks had been replaced with judge Charles Wide ‘in secret and against his will’ because Wide was perceived as being more likely to secure a conviction. This rationale was angrily denied by Sir Nigel Sweeney, the judge who was alleged to have had something to do with the decision. Sweeney had a fairly shameful history (see post ‘A Future Leader Of The Labour Party’) and I do wonder if he might have been worried what those ‘Sun’ journalists might dig up if they continued to bribe public officials for information.

There seems to be a great many safe pairs of hands at the Criminal Bar, protecting a great many people. I don’t really mind if politicians get ripped to the tits and participate in gay or indeed heterosexual orgies, but I do mind when they employ their extensive networks to protect people who have forced ‘looked after children’ to take part in such things with them. Or indeed protect people who perjure themselves repeatedly in an attempt to imprison the likes of me because we unwittingly walked into the whole sordid mess when we discovered what the Top Doctors were colluding with.

Most of Ronnie Waterhouse’s whitewash was dedicated to excusing people employed in social care or social work who had abused children in care. However for those of us au fait with the mental health services in north Wales, there is a chapter that makes even more dreadful reading than the rest of the Waterhouse Report – the chapter concerning Gwynfa, a residential NHS unit for children with mental health problems, or in Ronnie’s parlance, ’emotionally disturbed and maladjusted children’. I need to remind readers yet again here that Ronnie’s definition of ‘disturbed’ and ‘maladjusted’, or indeed the mental health service’s definition, may well not be what the rest of the world – even in those days – would define as disturbed or maladjusted. In north Wales NHS speak it simply means that you’ve complained about a Top Doctor breaking the law or abusing their position. Ronnie’s chapter on Gwynfa demonstrates that this was as true in the children’s mental health services as it was in the adults’ services.

Gwynfa was a residential unit in Colwyn Bay that was a combined clinic and school. It was established in 1961 as an NHS psychiatric hospital for children with an on-site school. With the establishment of Clwyd County Council in 1974 the residential/clinic part became the responsibility of Clwyd Health Authority and the school became the responsibility of Clwyd County Council. Until 1982/83 the North Wales Child Guidance Clinic Service offered and monitored admissions, but after that it was administered by the Mental Health Unit of Clwyd Health Authority – yes, that bunch of goons who allowed Dr Dafydd Alun Jones to illegally bang up anyone who crossed his path, who oversaw a shagfest in the North Wales Hospital Denbigh and who failed to investigate any complaints, even those of serious abuse of patients. Gwynfa by this time was an 18 bed unit for children below school leaving age, staffed by eight qualified nurses, six ‘other’ nurses (who won’t have actually been nurses if they weren’t qualified) and four psychologists. A child psychiatrist, Dr Barry Kiehn, was appointed in 1981 his remit being specifically Gwynfa and according to Waterhouse it was at this time that ‘the concept of a therapeutic community was introduced’. In April 1993 the administration of Gwynfa was taken over by the Clwydian Community Care NHS Trust after an NHS reorganisation. Of course the people managing and staffing the Clwydian Community Care NHS Trust were exactly the same corrupt old gits who had managed and staffed the previous organisations. Letters in my possession regarding my own case written after the ‘reorganisation’ are signed by exactly the same people and use exactly the same phrases as before. Believe me, nothing changed. The average stay for the patients at Gwynfa was five months, although some were there a lot longer.

The overall responsibility for managing Gwynfa was taken by the Principal Nursing Officer, who was responsible for recruitment and selection of staff. They reported to the Unit Nursing Officer (later known as the Director of Nursing Services) at the North Wales Hospital Denbigh, who visited Gwynfa about once a month. So Gwynfa was ultimately run by the person who ran Denbigh. When I read that I knew that the tales from the children at Gwynfa would be bad. Gwynfa was shut down in 1997 – I wonder whether that decision had been made in anticipation of what former patients might say to the Waterhouse Inquiry.

Between 1972-1990 the Principal Nursing Officer for Gwynfa was Nigel Mannering Berry. By 1972 he had already been employed there for nine years. Waterhouse tells us that Berry qualified as a registered mental nurse in 1959 and had been previously employed at Denbigh. So the ‘therapeutic community’ for children was run by something out of the ark who had worked at Denbigh when Gwynne the lobotomist was in full swing. Waterhouse notes that Berry had no specific training in dealing with ‘disturbed’ children. Waterhouse states that since 1974 there had been five internal investigations/reviews of the conduct of specific members of nursing staff at Gwynfa.

In 1986 a male member of staff had head butted a boy patient. The nurse received a final warning (which suggests that he’d done similar things previously) and was transferred to ‘another hospital’ for adults. Probably the North Wales Hospital, presumably so he could head butt patients there.

In 1991 an investigation was held into the relationship between a 16 year old girl with a depressive disorder and a 45 year old auxillary nurse, Robert Martin Williams. We are told that the investigation began after a ‘letter’ was found, but staff were unable to encourage the girl to supply details of Williams’s activities. I wonder how hard they tried. Waterhouse notes that Williams had been previously ‘counselled’ (!) regarding his behaviour towards patients after other staff members raised concerns about him. He denied an unspecified ‘offence’ and resigned. Waterhouse goes on to explain that in 1996 the girl told the police that Williams had actually raped her twice. Waterhouse refers to a ‘highly incriminating letter’ which he had seen himself. Williams was charged with two counts of rape and in March 1997 was convicted at Mold Crown Court of both offences and sentenced to six years in prison. I note that like many other children at Gwynfa this girl had not been in care, so could not even be dehumanised and dishonoured like so many of the ‘troublesome’ young people in the children’s homes who were abused. Neither was she ‘disturbed’ or ‘maladjusted’ – even Gwynfa described her as ‘depressed’. So a 16 year old girl with depression was raped twice by a member of staff. And nothing happened until some years later when there was a major police investigation into the care of children in north Wales. Had there not been that investigation, Clwyd Health Authority and the North Wales Hospital would have sat on those rapes forever. Waterhouse notes that the girl who had been raped ‘did not feel able’ to use the complaints system. No-one asked her why. Of course, readers who have read my earlier posts will know that by the time that this teenager ‘did not feel able’ to use the complaints system, I had used that system and I had used it to raise concerns about, among other things, Dr Dafydd Alun Jones’s conduct towards female patients and staff at the North Wales Hospital physically assaulting patients. I got nowhere and interestingly enough at the time that this girl was being raped in Gwynfa, I was being dragged through the High Court by Sir Robert Francis QC – at the behest of psychiatrists in north Wales – who was demanding my imprisonment for ‘harassment’ because I was writing numerous letters alleging that patients were being criminally abused in the north Wales mental health services (see post ‘The Sordid Role Of Sir Robert Francis QC’).

But it transpired that there had been many other allegations of abuse by children who had been patients at Gwynfa and that by July 1993 it was clear that there was a problem with allegations of a ‘serious nature’. It was about this time that I was receiving letters from Laurie Wood, the former manager of the mental health services in Clwyd who then became Chief Exec of the Clwydian Community NHS Trust, refusing to reopen my own complaint and reassuring me that he was certain that no-one else was having the sort of experiences that I had – although of course at the same time maintaining that nobody had behaved improperly in my case at all. In July 1993 Detective Superintendent Ackerley from the North Wales Police was invited to conduct a fuller investigation into Gwynfa. That’s the North Wales Police whose officers conspired with Dr Dafydd Alun Jones to unlawfully arrest people and detain them in the North Wales Hospital – the same North Wales Police who returned children to children’s homes after they’d run away to escape the beatings and the buggery, the same North Wales Police who returned patients to Denbigh if they ran off even though they were being held there illegally. The same North Wales Police who employed Gordon Anglesea, who was abusing boys in care himself.

Waterhouse intriguingly tells us that ‘at some stage’ the NHS Trust ‘became aware’ that seven former patients had made serious allegations to the police against a member of staff who was still employed at Gwynfa, referred to only as Z. The Trust asked the police to ask the former patients who had made statements for their permission for the Trust to access the statements for internal disciplinary purposes. Only four patients gave permission. Waterhouse simply observes that because of this the NHS Trust had to investigate the matter ‘on an incomplete basis’. Ronnie doesn’t ask why the other patients had given statements to the police but wouldn’t co-operate with the Trust. Had they perhaps found themselves repeatedly up in Court after NHS staff made daft allegations about them? Ronnie tells us that the legal advice that the Trust Board received was that the available evidence was insufficient to justify Z’s dismissal. That advice would have come from the same source as the advice to repeatedly arrest me after I made serious complaint – that source being Andrew Park, the bent solicitor from the Welsh Office. Two members of staff were transferred to a day hospital. There’s a familiar pattern here – serious allegations made against a staff member, complaints mysteriously dropped or not followed up, the member of staff at the centre of the allegations transferred to work somewhere else with equally vulnerable people. Exactly what happened when I complained about the SEN Stephen Rose, employed at the North Wales Hospital, assaulting me. No investigation, but Rose relocated to Park Lane Hospital – an institution notorious for staff abusing patients. Regarding Z, it gets worse. Yet further allegations against Z were made at a later date and Z was finally suspended in July 1997. In March 1999 the CPS stated that a prosecution was not justified.

Altogether 27 people told the Waterhouse Tribunal that they had been abused at Gwynfa. 23 people complained about incidents between 1974-1987, 10 of them named Z. At the time that Ronnie submitted his Report, the police investigation into Z was continuing. Ronnie states that it would be ‘inappropriate to make any further comment’ because he had not heard any evidence from Z and Z’s ‘legal position was not clear to the Tribunal’. So even with all those lawyers, the team of paralegals and administrators from the Welsh Office and his numerous advisors, poor old Ronnie – a former High Court judge – couldn’t clarify Z’s legal position. So no more was said. Not that Ronnie had reached his zenith with this comment – he admitted that although there were allegations of sexual abuse against four members of staff, ‘they do not suggest a pattern of such abuse among staff’. His rationale for this thinking was bizarre – it was because each allegation of sexual abuse was made about a different member of staff, on a different occasion, by a different patient. Which suggests to me that there was one hell of a problem – particularly as one member of staff was already in prison for the double rape of a patient and dear old Z was at the centre of a police investigation. It’s also highly likely that there were many more allegations that no-one ever got to hear about. We learn from Ronnie’s Report that a 13 year old girl was indecently assaulted but did not report it at the time and that a 17 year old male patient was buggered in 1979/80, but that this allegation didn’t come to light until the police interviewed the complainant in 1992 – in 1993 there was a decision not to prosecute.

Ronnie didn’t just hear about sexual abuse at Gwynfa. Again and again bizarre stories – bizarre but all too believable to those of us who know how the mental health services routinely conducted themselves – were related by former patients. A boy who was described as ‘behaving disruptively’ at a private school in Llandudno was sent to Gwynfa – but he thought that he was going into hospital to have his heart investigated! Who told him this cock and bull story? And what was the nature of his ‘disruptive behaviour’ at the private school in Llandudno? Which school was it? We know that people were diverted into the mental health services if they crossed the paths of certain people or questioned abuses – is it possible that something was going on in the school in Llandudno that shouldn’t have been? This boy told Waterhouse that his year at Gwynfa had been a ‘waste of time’, that he hadn’t been helped, that the education at Gwynfa was inadequate, but he also told of two very serious assaults from male members of staff. On one occasion, a harness was made of rubber rings and he was yanked up on a door using this contraption – it was incredibly painful but he was told by the ‘nurses’ who did this to ‘take it in good spirit’. On another occasion he was dropped onto the ground outside from a first floor window. Each of these incidents was constructed as being the patient’s own fault. As every assault on a mental health patient in north Wales always is.

A girl felt so uneasy about Z that she told her (female) social worker that she didn’t like him. The social worker told her not to be silly, he was nice. The girl persisted with her concerns about Z – the social worker stated that she was ‘seeking attention’. Again this is depressingly familiar – over the last thirty years, I and others consistently raised concerns about staff who were doing things that they shouldn’t have been doing. We too were fobbed off constantly with idiocies – I lost count of the number of times that I was told that Dafydd Alun Jones had ‘helped people’, that ‘other patients like him’ or even, yes, that he was ‘nice’. He wasn’t, he was/is a fucking criminal who was abusing patients and everyone knew it. What chance did CHILDREN stuck in a residential unit for months have against staff who were groping them, raping them and throwing them out of windows? Ronnie admits that one witness at the Tribunal remembered being physically assaulted by Z – Ronnie simply states ‘we say no more about it’. Other former patients remembered being gagged with elastoplasts that were then ripped off, hit on the head with a pool cue, hung out of a window, regularly assaulted and beaten up. One witness described how a dog collar was put on him and he was led around on a lead – he was seven years old. One former patient compared Gwynfa to a prison. Which it was, but probably one with fewer safeguards.

Waterhouse details two ‘therapies’ that were used at Gwynfa. ‘Pyjama therapy’ – where the children had their clothes removed and could only wear pyjamas. (I witnessed an adult male patient subjected to this at Ysbyty Gwynedd in the early 1990s.) But Gwynfa also had ‘bed therapy’ – children’s clothes AND pyjamas were removed from them so they were forced to remain in bed. Presumably naked under the covers with a bunch of rapists ‘caring’ for them. Sexual assault therapy could well have followed.

Despite the graphic accounts of the daily abuse that so many children endured, Ronnie decided that ‘the picture we have received of conditions at Gwynfa has been incomplete’ and ‘we have not attempted to reach detailed conclusions about the regime at Gwynfa’. Ronnie does have a bit of advice concerning Gwynfa though. He notes that it was staffed by male adult psychiatric nurses with no experience of child care, so he recommended that there should be more social services involvement, with trained residential care staff being introduced and that senior staff should have qualifications in residential child care. So instead of being assaulted by a bunch of former Denbigh nurses, the children could be assaulted by the sort of children’s social care staff that the rest of Ronnie’s Report was concerned with.

It seems that the abuses at Gwynfa only came to light when in Sept 1991 a former Gwynfa patient appeared on TV and a police investigation followed. Clwyd Health Authority reacted by ordering an investigation and a report from Irene Train, who was at the time of the Waterhouse Inquiry, Divisional General Manager (North) of Clwyd’s Community and Mental Health Unit. Irene featured in a previous blog post ‘It’s A Piece Of Cake’. In 1990 after Stephen Norris the Officer in Charge of a children’s home called Cartrefle had been convicted of sexual assault, the ACPC (Area Children’s Protection Committee) was asked to conduct a review. Irene Train was Vice-Chair – and then Chair – of the ACPC. She was at that time Director of Public Health Nursing in Clwyd Health Authority. So Irene was someone else who was in a very senior position, was very well-networked and even Chaired the ACPC – who was just so taken aback by all the allegations of violence and rape that emerged after people started appearing on TV and in the press. Irene presented ‘written evidence’ to the Tribunal informing Ronnie that: there was now ‘confidential free telephone facilities for patients to obtain individual counselling’; the development of child advocacy services; and that patients were informed of their right to have their complaints dealt with by the Chief Exec and a right of appeal to a non-executive director of the NHS Trust. Right – there is no confidentiality in the north Wales mental health services, the entire system works on gossip and rumour; hardly any of the ‘counsellors’ employed know anything about counselling, nearly all of them have been ‘trained’ by the same lame abusive idiots that have spawned the disaster in the first place; the ‘advocacy’ services positively ensure that no competent ‘advocate’ is ever employed and most of the ‘advocates’ are ‘service users’ themselves who are dependent upon the system and far too frightened to challenge it; the Chief Exec was Laurie Wood, who was ultimately responsible for the abusive services and who was very much part of the problem; a non-executive director of the NHS Trust will not step on anyone’s toes. So I really don’t think that Irene Train’s bright ideas were ever going to stop any future patients being abused.

So the children at Gwynfa were raped and assaulted and as with the children in care I expect that many – if not most of them – will be dead by now. What of those responsible for the ‘service’? Such as Dr Barry Kiehn, the child psychiatrist specifically responsible for the ‘therapeutic community’ that was Gwynfa? Barry Kiehn is now retired and living the life of Riley. His twitter feed informs us that he lives in Colwyn Bay (as so many featured in the wrongdoing detailed on this blog do) and he enjoys opera, classical music, ballet, art, ceramics, travel, languages, science and singing. How did such a cultured man stand by whilst his young patients were sexually assaulted and battered by a bunch of ageing thugs who had been transferred from the North Wales Hospital Denbigh? What about Irene, the most senior nurse responsible for those thugs? Irene is now retired but she keeps busy. In 2003-2004 she was Secretary for St David’s Promotions Ltd – that’s the fundraising bit of St David’s Hospice. The St David’s Hospice in Llandudno that gave the former manager of the Hergest Unit Alun Davies a job as Chief Exec after his corruption and mismanagement left the Hergest Unit a heap of smouldering rubble; the St David’s Hospice who, once Davies finally went, gave the dreadful Trystan Pritchard a job as Chief Exec – the Trystan who was responsible for lies, deceit and mismanagement when he worked at Ysbyty Gwynedd, the Trystan with Masonic connections who was on excellent terms with the regime of managers previously employed by the North West Wales NHS Trust. Please see post ‘The CEOs Of St David’s Hospice’ for more information. In 2006 however, Irene Train turned up as a company director, along with a Howard Geoffrey Train and a number of other people with the surname ‘Train’, of an outfit called H Domestic Agency Ltd. H Domestic Agency’s address is 99 Blimco Grove, Cambridge, should anyone wish to contact Irene and ask her a few questions about her glorious career in Clwyd. As for Nigel Mannering Berry, the pig who was ‘Principal Nursing Officer’ at Gwynfa, who oversaw the brutality and the abuse after gaining so much ‘experience’ at Denbigh – well he lives in Colwyn Bay as well. Specifically at 40 Yerburgh Avenue, Colwyn Bay, LL29 7NB. But guess what? Between 1993-94 Nigel was a Director of Colwyn Bay Masonic Hall! Ah, the Masons that never provided any sort of protective network at all for anyone involved in the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal – we know that because Ronnie confirmed in his Report that there was no evidence of Masonic links and so did Stephen Crabb, who was Secretary of State for Wales when the cover-up that covered up Ronnie’s cover-up, ie. the Macur Review, was published. I invite Ronnie and Stephen Crabb to do what I’ve just done, google Nigel Mannering Berry and read that very long list of names that are associated with the Colwyn Bay Masonic Hall – and that’s just the Colwyn Bay contingent. And if they’ve got time Ronnie and Stephen can google dear old Mrs Train and her former associates at St David’s Hospice – they’re all there, the elderly negligent fuckwits from yesteryear who brought the north Wales NHS to it’s knees.

There is of course one elderly negligent fuckwit who was in a senior management role with the Clwyd mental health services whilst horrors were being perpetuated at Gwynfa who has not yet been put out to grass. That is Dr Peter Higson, the current Chairman of the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board. Let me remind you Higson: a 16 year old girl with depression raped twice; a 17 year old boy buggered; a seven year old boy fitted with a dog collar and led around on a lead; children dropped out of windows; hit with pool cues; regularly assaulted and beaten.

Waterhouse makes an passing observation regarding Gwynfa that I find telling. That most of the patients there were actually from Gwynedd – and that Barry Kiehn was categorised as a child psychiatrist employed by Gwynedd Health Authority. So it was those fine upstanding Top Doctors from Gwynedd who were referring children to a ‘hospital’ where they were beaten and raped.

Do all these people not owe the world an explanation? Or am I just being silly because they’re nice?

Yesterday’s post ‘A UK Network’ explained why I suspect that the Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal may have been precipitated as a distraction at a time when it rather looked as though the lid was about to be blown off the activities of the paedophile ring operating in north Wales and their buddies in the mental health services. I described how there was obviously a network of corrupt professional people stretching across the UK who were concealing rampant abuses in the child care and mental health services and speculated on possible links between north Wales and the north east of England. I mentioned the notorious Bryn Alyn Community, a private business run by a vicious criminal, John Allen, who was subsequently imprisoned for sexual assaults on teenage boys. Bryn Alyn was established in 1968 and accepted hundreds of children sent from Local Authorities across the UK. I’ve just read the part of the Waterhouse Report that deals with Bryn Alyn and it’s even more mind-blowing than the rest of Waterhouse’s whitewash.

The first thing that I noticed was Waterhouse’s mention of which Local Authorities sent children to Bryn Alyn – substantially London authorities, but also authorities from the north west of England, the West Midlands and Newcastle no less. So that pretty much confirms my suspicions regarding the locations of professionals who were colluding with those we know and love in north Wales, as postulated in previous posts. However there are other authorities mentioned as well – including Devon and Oxfordshire. But Waterhouse mentions something else that I was not previously aware of – that John Allen owned a villa in Bordeaux and also some sort of facility in Bordeaux where children from Bryn Alyn were taken for ‘holidays’. Someone else I know used to pop back and forth to Bordeaux for the purposes of ‘work’ which no-one ever actually specified – Dr Dafydd Alun Jones! Dafydd made frequent visits to northern France as well, again on the pretext of visiting ‘GP friends’ or ‘holding clinics’ – which I always felt was rather improbable. Regular readers will remember some other people from north Wales who enjoyed visits to France – Elfed Roberts and his mates! Elfed was a former senior police officer in the North Wales Police, left under a substantial cloud and then became Chair of the North West Wales NHS Trust – one of his high points during his incumbency there was to have me arrested for having pink hair, calling his car a penismobile and because he was ‘fed up’ of my complaints (please see post ‘After The Attempt To Frame Me…’). Elfed and his friends used to frequent an establishment that I remember being called Chateau de Cop – I have found online adverts for a hotel in the Loire Valley called Chateau de Cop Choux, I think that is indeed the hang-out that Elfed and his mates use. The disgraced of north Wales certainly enjoy a good standard of living – but have they not heard of something called the European Arrest Warrant? (Another disgraced name featured on the blog also has a house not a million miles away from Bordeaux – Robert Bluglass. He has (or had) a second home in the Pyrenees.)

Some of the Local Authorities had received complaints from children regarding the abuse that they had been subjected to whilst at Bryn Alyn. In 1976 Anthony David Taylor was convicted of two offences of indecent assault at Talgarth Magistrates Court. In 1975, before the Court case, Taylor wrote to the Welsh Office admitting that he’d committed previous offences against boys from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne whilst they were on a summer holiday scheme that Taylor ran for Bryn Alyn, asking the Secretary of State for anonymity for social workers when they had committed offences, citing his own case! The Secretary of State for Wales at the time was John Morris aka Lord Morris of Aberavon. But of course the Welsh Office had no idea that there were serious problems with child abuse in homes in north Wales… In previous posts I mentioned how Waterhouse used numerous techniques to dismiss or discount evidence from witnesses when they explained how they had been violently or sexually assaulted whilst in care in north Wales and ignored other evidence such as forged documents that would have set off loud alarm bells in any intelligent person. What is Waterhouse’s comment with regard to this social worker who freely fesses up to abusing children but feels able to write to John Morris asking for anonymity? Waterhouse states that the Inquiry heard from four other witnesses that Taylor sexually assaulted them whilst they were at Bryn Alyn, that the panel had ‘no reason to doubt the truth of any of the complainants’ but that Taylor is ‘now retired and ill and it is unnecessary to say anything further about him’.

This was exactly what used to be said to me when I mentioned Dr Dafydd Alun Jones’s activities – ‘he’s retired’. Except Dafydd hadn’t retired, he was running private nursing homes where people alleged that they were being abused and fleeced and had been given the contract by the NHS to provide ‘substance misuse services’ (please see post ‘The Evolution Of A Drugs Baron?’). As for when I mentioned Dr T. Gwynne Williams the lobotomist – people would simply yell at me ‘he’s dead, how dare you say such things’. Dr X/Dr Tony Francis and the dreadful Dr DGE Wood even documented that I had ‘even’ made terrible allegations against ‘deceased’ people. The deceased people had done some terrible things – and as the complaints about them had been ignored whilst they were alive it was hardly surprising that I was not prepared to keep quiet about them just because they had died. Another ‘deceased person’ who abused her position was Sheila Jenkins, a social worker with the appalling Arfon Community Mental Health Team, who lied about me to the police in order to have me unlawfully thrown out of Ysbyty Gwynedd – Sheila was also happy to slander me in the local community. I was told to stop ‘speaking ill of the dead’ at my own birthday party by a former colleague of Sheila’s husband. I suspect that the man at my birthday party had no bloody idea at all of the sort of things that dear old Sheila actually did, but the people who worked with her, as well as those who worked with Dafydd and the lobotomist, most definitely knew what they were all up to. But I suspect that it was DGE Wood’s valiant defence of those who concealed the paedophile gang that landed him his senior roles with the Royal College of General Practitioners and perhaps even bagged him his OBE…

A boy from Plymouth placed at Bryn Alyn made complaints to the police in Oct 1989 and Aug 1990 and a solicitor’s letter was sent to his social worker in Plymouth in June 1990. Devon Social Services reported their concerns about Bryn Alyn to the Welsh Office in Oct 1990. Boys from Sandwell and Solihull in the West Midlands made allegations of abuse whilst at Bryn Alyn and a number of complaints between 1988-1993 were also reported to the Welsh Office.

In March 1993 a 15 year old girl placed at Bryn Alyn by Oxfordshire Social Services went to Clwyd Social Services with complaints of physical abuse from staff and sexual harassment from other residents and refused to return to Bryn Alyn. She stated that at one point she had been thrown across the room by a male member of staff which resulted in injury. She was placed with foster parents. The next month she turned up at Wrexham Police Station saying that she wished to withdraw the complaint. Waterhouse notes that the police wanted to continue to pursue the complaint in the public interest, but the CPS returned the file, refusing to take further action. The Director for Public Prosecutions at this time was Dame Barbara Mills. All was well in Waterhouse World though – he noted that the girl acknowledged that the man who threw her across the room had a ‘very positive, caring and supportive relationship’ with her. When he wasn’t throwing her across the room. Or perhaps even sending the boys around to ensure that she withdrew her complaint whilst she was living with foster parents – a placement presumably arranged by whoever had sent her to Bryn Alyn.

Manchester and Salford College of Technology as well as Manchester Social Services were also told of the sort of things that happened to young people at Bryn Alyn. A mature student called Denis Williams had the misfortune to end up on a ‘placement’ at Bryn Alyn in 1983. He was so appalled at what he witnessed that he compiled a report and sent it to Manchester and Salford College of Technology. In Nov 1983 he was told by an unidentified ‘senior officer’ from Manchester Social Services Dept that his concerns had been fully investigated and that his report was ‘unfounded and unprofessional’. He was also told that John Allen was threatening legal action against him. Denis was made of stern stuff and in June 1985 went to the Home Office about events at Bryn Alyn. The Home Secretary at that time was Leon Brittan. No-one seemed to have mounted an investigation or put a stop to what was happening. Waterhouse notes that in Sept 1992 Denis was interviewed by a number of newspapers and BBC TV. Guess what? Denis was unable to be traced by the Tribunal so wasn’t available as a witness! Of course by the time that the Waterhouse Inquiry was held, a number of former residents of Bryn Alyn and the other homes in north Wales had been found dead. I wonder if Denis too had been found dead in suspicious circumstances by then? Because I’ve not heard of him since. But Ronnie has an explanation! ‘The picture given by Denis Williams is truly alarming…but he stayed only three days…his strictures upon particular individuals were not mirrored by the volume of substantial complaints about them’. Denis did what any good student should do – he noted everything, got the hell out of there and sent a report to the college who had sent him on the placement. He was rubbished, threatened with legal action by a vicious paedophile, alerted the Home Office in the wake of the threats, got nowhere, went to the press and then disappeared off the face of the earth. Ronnie merely notes that not many other people had complained…

Waterhouse documents that the ‘principal witness on behalf of the Welsh Office’, John Lloyd, ‘told us of a number of allegations of physical and sexual abuse at the Community’s various premises that were reported to the Welsh Office between 1989 and 1992’. In May 1993 there were two other reports to the Welsh Office of boys at Bryn Alyn who had been injured after alleged assaults.

Waterhouse was told again and again of sexual assaults and assaults so brutal that young people sustained injuries. One boy suffered anal bleeding after a sexual assault, was taken to a GP and was – interestingly – told that he had haemorrhoids. So there was a tame Top Doctor on tap as well then. Waterhouse was told by another witness that he had been tied to a tree with a piece of rope, the end of the rope being tied around his neck. Ronnie noted that the witness who related this anecdote was now a patient at Broadmoor. I wonder how he ended up there? Were there perhaps allegations made regarding his extreme dangerousness by any of the people previously named on this blog, in the face of no evidence at all? Or had the poor sod been driven crazy after a few years at Bryn Alyn? (Waterhouse notes that placements at Bryn Alyn were long-term, most being about three years.) There were other allegations of abuse against the man who tied this person to a tree – but Ronnie concludes that the evidence was ‘so limited’ that he was ‘not persuaded he was party to child abuse’. (Of course if someone really wasn’t going to be party to child abuse at Bryn Alyn they’d walk out after three days. And find that they were called a liar and then find themselves threatened with legal action.) A young woman gave evidence that when she was at Bryn Alyn as a teenager, she was forced into a chair by two staff and strong bleach was rubbed into her scalp. Her hair subsequently fell out. Other people gave evidence that they were punched, kicked and thrown around. But all poor old Ronnie could do was observe that these were ‘troublesome’ children, that some former residents were ‘too emotionally disturbed to give oral evidence and be cross examined’, that staff hadn’t had training in restraint so were just doing their best really, that one man constantly accused of violently assaulting children was ‘strong, a disciplinarian’ but ‘fair’…

It just goes on and on, as this silly old fucker was confronted with the most damning evidence stretching back over decades and constantly explained it away. Of course sometimes he couldn’t explain it away, so as he did in the case of the forged document that was compiled in an attempt to get Nefyn Dodd off the hook (please see post ‘I Know Nuzzing…’), he just notes it and moves on. For example he noted that ‘for unexplained reasons’ details on the P45s given out to two of the staff at Bryn Alyn are inconsistent with the employment records of Bryn Alyn. In other chapters of his Report he notes that the dates that certain witnesses maintained that they were resident in various children’s homes in north Wales are inconsistent with the records of the establishments themselves. So Waterhouse concludes that the witnesses can’t be relied upon. Of course, the records compiled by the criminals running these institutions – criminals who had a track record of abusing children, lying, forging documents and altering documentation – couldn’t possibly be wrong… Ronnie observes without comment that the records of the children placed at Bryn Alyn had all been stored together, at a Pickford’s storage depot in Hoole near Chester and on 25 Oct 1996 had all gone up in flames, so most of the children placed at Bryn Alyn could never be traced and therefore couldn’t be invited to give evidence.

I have mentioned in a previous post that the only people whom Waterhouse found it in his heart to condemn in his Report were the staff who had actually been convicted of offences against children and were already serving – or had served – prison sentences. So what did he have to say about John Allen, the owner of the nightmare that was Bryn Alyn, who at the time of the Inquiry had been convicted of sexual offences against young people in his care and who was in prison? Waterhouse was told repeatedly of the numerous sexual assaults that Allen carried out on boys at Bryn Alyn and was also told that Allen gave large sums of money and gifts – substantial gifts as well, on one occasion a motorbike – to favoured boys with whom he regularly had sex. He was told about Allen’s violent temper, which resulted in ferocious attacks on children leaving them with injuries. He was even told that there were a number of boys at Bryn Alyn who were openly referred to as ‘Allen’s bum boys’. Waterhouse states of Allen that ‘his reputation was that of a caring and generous person’. Waterhouse stresses how staff had told him that Allen lavished money and gifts on certain boys, of how ‘kind and generous’ he was. Of course Waterhouse is aware that there was ‘some contemporaneous discussion and gossip about Allen’s predilections among both staff and residents’ and that there ‘was some talk of Allen’s ‘bum boys’ but it did not amount to a great deal’.

I had heard something similar to this many years ago when I first complained about Dr Dafydd Alun Jones. I was castigated for referring to his ‘private life’ ie. his shagging of female patients. I too was told that a lot of people thought that Jones was a nice man because he ‘helped’ patients by giving them somewhere to live and finding them jobs. The patients concerned were invariably young female patients, the accommodation that they were provided with was Jones’s own house and the jobs in question were located in his house, as nannies and housekeepers. Whilst all this was going on, five female patients made statements to a local MIND representative that they had had sexual relationships with him. As for Dafydd himself – when I told him that he was nothing short of a psychopath, he replied ‘I think that I am a nice man. I’m kind to children.’ Well Dafydd was nuts, of course he would come out with some silly, obviously untrue statement, but he was surrounded by dozens of people who knew exactly what he was doing – just like all those people who waxed lyrical about John Allen’s generosity knew what he was doing. Waterhouse had an interesting take on John Allen’s violent attacks on children as well: ‘We do not think that he was an habitually violent man: the complaints against him of using excessive force are heavily outweighed by the allegations against him of sexual misconduct’.

One allegation that victims of Allen made was that he ran a gay prostitution racket, including a number of brothels and also a gay porn business. Waterhouse makes reference to Allen’s ‘film studio’ and boys alleged that they’d been taken there and asked to pose naked, but still old Ronnie doesn’t click. Ronnie did note however that Allen continued his contact with some of the boys long after they’d left Bryn Alyn. Ronnie takes a dim view of this, mentioning that boys were ‘encouraged to live in unfamiliar surroundings such as Brighton or London in accommodation provided or subsidised by Allen….at a time when they were highly likely to fall prey to many temptations’. Temptations such as working in a brothel in Brighton or London owned by Allen one presumes.

By the time that Waterhouse stumbled through this Inquiry with his eyes tightly closed, a lot of former residents of children’s homes in north Wales had been found dead. Some had been killed in a fire in Brighton, whilst they were attending a party at which John Allen agreed to meet them. John Allen didn’t turn up but an arsonist did (see post ‘The Silence Of The Welsh Lambs’). Waterhouse even manages to mention that a Court had reached a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ after the Brighton fire, but then he passes on… He also mentions another witness who had made allegations of abuse against Allen – this witness had given evidence at John Allen’s trial for sexual assault and had been found dead days later… All in a day’s work for Ronnie though, he moves on to the next brutalised terrified witness who’s dared come forward, no doubt busily working out how he can discredit them or dismiss their evidence…It is also mentioned in the Waterhouse Report that the police had admitted that there were 280 ‘absconders’ from the Bryn Alyn Community between Jan 1 1991 and 19 June 1991. ‘Absconders’ in this case being kids running away from people who were battering them and raping them, rather than armed robbers escaping from the Scrubs. I bet that the police returned every one of them to the caring embrace of John Allen as well. What on earth did the police – and Ronnie – think had caused 280 kids to flee during a period of six months?

So what did Ronnie conclude was the prevailing situation at Bryn Alyn? Get ready, here comes a summary worthy of Perry Mason: ‘…(John Allen apart) sexual abuse by members of staff of the Community was not rife…’ Ronnie did have a reservation though – that ‘the…few girl residents were specifically vulnerable’ to the sexual abuse that he did admit was happening at Bryn Alyn…’ No Ronnie, you’ve got it wrong. The girls were comparatively safe – as much as anyone could ever be safe in that hell-hole – because it was the BOYS that they wanted to force to work in their male prostitution racket. That Ronnie is why the girls weren’t getting expensive presents like hi fis and motorbikes – it wasn’t them being bribed and beaten into providing sexual favours for all and sundry, including it would seem a few bigwigs from Westminster, it was the boys… One would have thought that Ronnie would have realised that something was amiss though – even he noted that it was ‘a grave concern that so many members of staff were named in a major police investigation’…

The numerous reports that were given to the Welsh Office regarding complaints from the youngsters at Bryn Alyn apart, it seems that the Welsh Office had long since been aware of the unsuitability of Bryn Alyn as a facility for children. Ronnie explains that Bryn Alyn was finally removed from the register by the Welsh Office in 1997 but it would be ‘unnecessarily tedious’ to detail the exchanges between the Welsh Office and the Bryn Alyn Community (indeed – who knows what was revealed in those exchanges). However, Ronnie mentions that Welsh Office Inspectors recognised in 1975 that Allen’s ‘expansionist regime’ (Allen was certainly packing the kids in – at it’s peak the ‘Community’ housed some 250 children and there were frequently insufficient facilities such as bedrooms for them), did not have the infrastructure to cater for the residents and that ‘basic problems’ were allowed to ‘proliferate’ over twenty years. It seems that during those 20 years, the Welsh Office raised a few questions and their own inspections of Bryn Alyn – when they actually did them – noted serious problems. But John Allen was allowed to continue with his trade in people unhindered…

Regarding the connections between people who worked at Bryn Alyn and the wider UK – there were other links as well as those with the Local Authorities that were placing children there. For a start although most of the Bryn Alyn Community was based around Wrexham, there were branches of it in Cheshire and Shropshire. Many staff members had worked in previous children’s homes and moved onto work at other children’s homes, both within and outside of the north Wales region. One member of staff was a former Liverpool probation officer. Some of the ‘senior managers’ had certificates in the residential care of children from Salford Polytechnic. Some of the teachers who worked there had qualifications in special needs from Chester College. One member of staff had previously worked for Derbyshire Social Services and had responded to one of the recruitment adverts in ‘New Society’ placed by John Allen. ‘New Society’ was, at that time, considered very much the journal for social work and carried pages of adverts for social work positions, including very senior ones, such as for Directors of Social Services. So John Allen was recruiting via the reputable professional journal, he did not even have to resort to the recruitment methods of Bryn Estyn ie. by word of mouth via the local Rugby Club. ‘New Society’ considered itself a liberal, progressive journal for the enlightened. I do not ever remember it carrying articles suggesting that the practices which were routine at Bryn Alyn even existed. Yet surely, word of life at Bryn Alyn must have reached the ears of many of it’s readers. John Allen seems to have been a bit of a Jimmy Savile – his abuses were an open secret. And not even that much of a secret.

My co-researcher has sent me a brief summary of John Allen’s brushes with the law. At some point in the 1970s he was sentenced to six years in prison for offences against children. In 2002 he was arrested for historic offences against children in the Wrexham and Flintshire areas. In 2003 a judge threw out 44 charges against him on the grounds that due to the publicity and the time lapse he would not get a fair trial. In August 2013 Allen was charged again under Operation Pallial. In November 2014 he appeared at Mold Crown Court, charged with 40 offences of indecent assault and another 20 sex offences against children. He was subsequently found guilty on 26 charges of child abuse and in December 2014 was jailed for life.

The Waterhouse Inquiry was ordered by William Hague whilst he was Secretary of State for Wales. His PPS at the time was Nigel Evans. The Permanent Secretary will have been either Rachel Lomax or Sir Michael Scholar. Sir Michael Scholar is a man with many fingers in many pies. Between 1982 and 1983 he was Private Secretary to Margaret Thatcher. He was Permanent Secretary at the Welsh Office between 1993 and 1996. He was appointed President of St John’s College, University of Oxford in August 2001. He is also Pro Vice Chancellor, Chairman of the Conference of Colleges and Chair of the Oxford University Careers Service. In 2008 he was appointed Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, which oversees the Office of National Statistics. He is an honorary fellow of the Universities of Aberystwyth and Cardiff and has an honorary doctorate from the University of South Wales (like so many others who seemed to play a role in concealing the dreadful reality of the north Wales children’s services or mental health services – please see post ‘Oh To Be In Receipt Of Academic Honours’). Michael’s son Tom is a civil servant too. He was appointed Chief of Staff at Number 10 Downing Street when Gordon Brown became PM – that was the Gordon who appointed Patricia Scotland as Attorney General.

Ronnie’s own autobiography, in Chapter 24, explains that when he was approaching retirement, he received a call out of the blue from the Welsh Office, telling him that he was going to be leading the Inquiry into the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal. Two other people made up Ronnie’s panel whom I haven’t yet mentioned. That was Margaret Clough and Morris Le Fleming. The reason that I haven’t mentioned them before is because there is very little information available about them. Margaret was something in social work and Le Fleming was involved in a company called ‘Groundworks’. They would seem to be literally nonentities.

Now would William Hague, Nigel Evans or Sir Michael Scholar like to tell us all who it was exactly who decided to appoint a man who personally knew some of those who in key political or public roles in the region under investigation; who knew even more people who knew other people directly connected with the scandal; who systematically discredited just about every witness except those who actually carried out the beatings, the buggery and the rapes; who ignored forged and doctored evidence and who somehow failed to notice that key witnesses had disappeared off the face of the earth or had been found dead? And who appointed two anonymous deadbeats to assist him as he conducted his Inquiry into the biggest child abuse scandal in the UK?

After the publication of the Waterhouse Report, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and quite understandably, as numerous people alleged that it had been a whitewash. One major criticism was of the terms of reference, which had been set by William Hague. The Inquiry only looked at the abuse of children within Gwynedd and Clwyd County Councils by the care staff. This of course meant that it failed to investigate what those care staff or other people connected with them did to the residents of children’s homes from north Wales outside of north Wales. If anyone wanted to find a more effective way of ensuring that no part of that Inquiry would touch on children from those homes being taken to other locations by their ‘carers’ to be molested by public figures – or indeed even being molested by public figures within the homes – they could not have thought of a better way to do so. In response to the questions raised about the limited remit of the Inquiry, a spokesman for Hague was quoted as saying ‘The Terms of reference were prepared by officials in the Welsh Office and agreed by Ministers and widely supported by Parliament. There were no serious representations from MPs or the judge to challenge them at any time’. What were the names of those officials and Ministers?

Lest anyone’s still in a sound sleep out there about how hard somebody was working to chuck a spanner in the works, my co-researcher has reminded me that the Welsh Office had a pretty big hand in things before they even got round to appointing the corrupt old git Ronnie and the two stooges. Nicola Davies QC was appointed by the Welsh Office DURING the Jillings investigation (please see post ‘It’s A Piece Of Cake’) to examine the need for a judicial inquiry. Why was this and who in the Welsh Office made the decision and subsequently appointed her? Davies subsequently stated that a judicial inquiry into the abuse allegations would not be in the public interest. The Jillings Report was suppressed on the advice of lawyers, including Michael Beloff QC – did Nicola Davies’s decision not to hold a judicial inquiry influence this decision? Yet only twelve months later, Hague announced that a judicial inquiry would be held and appointed Ronald Waterhouse to lead it.

Of course, the allegations of Waterhouse being a massive cover-up exploded again after the Jimmy Savile revelations. The Home Secretary at the time announced that there would be a review of Waterhouse, carried out by another judge, Lady Justice Macur. That Home Secretary was Theresa May. When the Macure Review was finally published it was so heavily redacted that it was virtually meaningless. Stephen Crabb, the Secretary of State for Wales, whilst reassuring everyone that of course no-one would ever seek to protect child abusers, stated that Macur was ‘satisfied’ with Waterhouse’s Inquiry and that there was ‘no reason to undermine Waterhouse’s findings’.

I am happy to tell Stephen Crabb, Theresa May and Lady Justice Macur that I am currently in possession of nearly 10,000 documents covering a period of nearly thirty years that were compiled by some of the social workers who facilitated the abuse of children in north Wales, by the corrupt lawyers who encouraged social workers and others to perjure themselves in attempts to have me imprisoned – one of those corrupt lawyers, Ron Evans, actually acted for the Local Authorities in north Wales at the Inquiry – and by scores of other ‘professionals’ who were involved in concealing what was happening. It is particularly farcical that at the very month that one of the very brave souls went to Clwyd Council and told them what had happened to her, refusing to go back to Bryn Alyn but who then suddenly withdrew her complaint, I was being dragged through the Courts in Bangor – accused of staring at a fucking social worker in Safeways. Of course, the original allegations against me were much more serious – that I had shouted and sworn at her and threatened to assault her. When cross-examined in Court, she started crying and admitted that I had not even spoken to her. And no-one asked any questions. But then no-one asked any questions on any of the occasions on which these people took me to Court and the cases collapsed because they had committed perjury – even when the charges were so serious that had I been found guilty I’d have faced a lengthy prison sentence. I invite Theresa, Stephen and Lady Justice Macur to read this blog, acquaint themselves with the full details and tell me that Waterhouse was no cover-up. Keen readers will of course have spotted that several names on today’s post have cropped up in the media in connection with the elusive Westminster Paedophile Ring.

Just to remind you all, here is the list of Secretaries of State for Wales who were in office whilst the Bryn Alyn Community was in operation:

I was asked the other day if I was going to attend any further meetings of the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board because people are missing my reviews of the Board meetings. Much as I know that I would derive much entertainment from observing those meetings, unfortunately I am not able to. That is because I am currently living at a secret location under police protection. Because somebody wants to kill me. I’m sure that I don’t need to explain why somebody might want to kill me.

Now, would the many people who have been outed on this blog care to start preparing their statements for the police, because believe me, the police are interested in you all.

Theresa May – I await an explanation for what your Gov’t and indeed your party have done to Wales.

A glut of Top Doctors from north west Wales have featured in the media this week after finding themselves in trouble.

The Daily Post online reported that Dr Richard Sion Williams, an ENT Consultant at Ysbyty Gwynedd, appeared in Llandudno Magistrates Court after being charged with threatening behaviour. Williams has been involved in a long running spat with the National Trust who own the Vaynol Estate near Bangor where Williams lives and things exploded on March 13. Two NT rangers removed approximately eight large concrete blocks that they found on a grass verge and put them back over Williams’s hedge, presuming that Williams had placed them on the verge. It seems that this scenario had happened a number of times previously and the rangers were following legal advice. The rangers then drove off, but slowly because the track was bumpy with potholes. Williams pursued them and according to John Whitley, one of the rangers, was ‘driving like a madman, very close to us, beeping his horn and flashing his headlights’. It is alleged that Williams got out of his vehicle and ran towards the rangers, whereupon Whitley told him ‘I’m not talking to you, you’re dangerous’. Williams got back into his vehicle, followed them and managed to overtake them twice, blocking their way. At one point after Williams had left his vehicle it is alleged that Williams ran alongside the rangers’ vehicle, banging on the window, yelling ‘I’m going to fucking kill you’. Whitley told the Court about Williams’s ‘sheer aggression and loss of control’, stating ‘I did fear for my safety…I really thought my life was in danger. I could see he meant me harm’. Whitley’s colleague Will Westwood claimed that ‘I thought he was going to ram us’. Williams’s barrister Ellen Owen maintained that the rangers’ story was ‘a flagrant case of lying on oath as these Courts are as likely to come across’. I hate to burst your bubble Ellen, but I think it is I who have evidence of the most flagrant cases of lying on oath that the Courts are as likely to come across – thirty years worth of documents compiled by Top Doctors, nurses, social workers and managers who lied their arses off on oath again and again, even after their own lawyers had told them that they didn’t have the evidence for their claims…. The Betsi now claims to have ‘lost’ these documents – but I still have my copies and I’ve stored them somewhere very safe, a long way from the Betsi’s paper shredders…

Another story from the Post featured the GPs of Meddygfa Rhydbach Surgery, Bontwnog (near Pwhelli), in particular a Dr Adriaan Smits. The surgery’s former practice manager, Meryl Williams, took this practice to an Employment Tribunal, alleging that the bunch of shites who double up as the partners there bullied her so badly that she was forced to resign. She has just won her claim for constructive dismissal. The story behind all this is that Meryl began work as a receptionist at the surgery in 1986 and in 1996 became practice manager, although she had never received formal training for this role. However, it seems that the previous partners thought highly of her and all was well until they retired. By 2014 the partners were Dr Adriaan Smits, Dr Gwyn Morris and Dr Zameel Haque. It was stated at the Tribunal that there was a long-running history of difficult interpersonal relationships between the surgery’s staff and the partners, particularly involving Dr Smits. In 2010 ten staff signed a letter complaining about Smits. He was described as ‘direct, brusque, blunt’ as well as ‘aggressive, irascible, overbearing’. After repeated clashes with Smits, Meryl eventually lodged a formal grievance, although at one point she had been talked out of lodging a formal grievance by Dr Gwyn Morris and she had subsequently raised the matter with the Local Health Board. After she lodged the formal grievance, the partners ‘closed ranks’, tried to discredit her and even accused her of financial irregularities, although they had no evidence of this. The partners referred the matter to independent consultants but the grievance and Meryl’s subsequent appeal were dismissed. The Employment Tribunal judge ruled in favour of Meryl however, stating that the independent consultants acted in good faith but had been unduly influenced by the partners’ approach which left them suspicious of the claimant. The judge referred to the environment of ‘oppression’ and ‘suspicion’ that Meryl worked in and that the partners could not be trusted to act fairly and reasonably in any procedures concerning her. I’m sorry to trump a Post shock horror scandal once more, but I think that the Hergest Unit and dear old Dr Tony Roberts have bettered the Bastards of Botwnog, who merely bullied an employee, accused her of nicking the dosh when she complained about them and then dripped poison into the ears of the ‘independent consultants’. When Tony Roberts did his best to ensure that I died some years ago – after I was assaulted by four staff whilst in his ‘care’ – because no-one at the North West Wales NHS Trust would co-operate with the investigation of my (very serious) complaint, my lawyer and I were instead offered a ‘mediator’ to resolve the situation. The mediator was from south Wales and was selected and paid for by the Trust. My lawyer constantly stressed to me that no matter how dreadfully the Trust had conducted themselves, we had to give the mediator a chance. So I agreed. The four staff who assaulted me refused to attend the mediation or answer any questions from me about any aspect of their conduct. Alun Davies, the manager of the Hergest Unit, refused to sit in the same room as me. Tony Roberts agreed to sit in the same room as me but only if I was accompanied by my lawyer and he was accompanied by the hospital solicitor, a duplicitous cow called Patricia Gaskell, whom I later discovered had done a very good impression of pretending to try to resolve the complaint when speaking to me and my lawyer, but behind the scenes was rolling over and reassuring violent staff and dangerous doctors that of course everything would be done on their terms. The heavily stage managed ‘mediation’ got underway and as the mediator finished outlining the terms of engagement, Roberts stood up, declared that ‘I’m not going to listen to this’ and waddled out of the room. Gaskell went after him and tried to persuade him to return but he wouldn’t. So that was the mediation. The mediator then wrote a letter stating that the situation was ‘unmediable’. Keith Thomson, Chief Exec of the Trust at that time, wrote a letter to my lawyer stating that the situation broke down because of my behaviour. He had to be reminded that it was Roberts who had walked out of the meeting before anyone had begun and that the rest of his staff refused to attend the meeting. Presumably the mediator who had witnessed all this didn’t feel able to write a letter explaining that Ysbyty Gwynedd was staffed by dangerous unhinged idiots throwing hissy fits, because it was the Trust who were paying him. At the time, Tony Roberts had such a high death rate among his patients that it showed up as a statistical outlier in the UK database. He continued to work at the Hergest Unit until last year.

There’s no guarantee of a better quality of practitioner if one ventures into the alternative medicine sector either, although having encountered Tony Roberts et al a lot of people do try this. Yet another story from the Post online features Michael Hammond, an osteopath from Llangoed, Ynys Mon, who has been bailed to appear at Caernarfon Crown Court next month to face trial for sexually assaulting a female patient and voyeurism.

As if to emphasise just how useless the Top Doctors of north Wales are, the Post was also reporting that a Paul Hanley was jailed for 21 months at Mold Crown Court for violently assaulting his girlfriend – he was described as ‘paranoid and controlling’, with mental health issues and had grown up in care. I can only imagine the sorry story that will have been his life.

The Mail online and BBC also featured a Top Doctor Fail story, that of the murder of 16 year old Christine Edkins, who was stabbed by Philip Simelane whilst she was on a bus on Birmingham. In 2013 Simelane, described as a ‘paranoid schizophrenic’, admitted manslaughter and was detained indefinitely under the Mental Health Act. A previous report into this event of course maintained that Christine’s death was not predictable or preventable, yet at the same time fessed up to ‘serious failures’ on the part of the mental health and prison services and paradoxically stated that had Simelane received mental health treatment the death could have been prevented. Yet another report has been produced regarding this case, one being commissioned by NHS England. It’s conclusions are just as confusing – that the death was not itself predictable nor was an attack on a member of the public, but it was clear that Simelane ‘would continue to deteriorate’ and was ‘likely to offend violently’. Simelane had previously spent time in prison for assault and battery on his mother, but even so her subsequent please for help were ignored – before he attacked Christine, his mother had rung the police six times in two days fearing that Simelane would kill her. The report admitted that the police and mental health services were aware of ‘multiple episodes’ involving Simelane and ‘multiple risk factors’. This is not the first mental health disaster from Birmingham by a long chalk – the Birmingham that boasts the University of Birmingham Medical School with it’s flagship ‘service user research’, the Birmingham that is living with the legacy of dear old Professor Robert Bluglass CBE, the UK’s leading forensic psychiatrist, until that was he asked for his name to be removed from the Medical Register and he disappeared from his academic posts…

In the face of all this extreme hopelessness, I notice that Stephen Crabb and Jeremy Hunt were making noises this week about paying the Top Doctors and Angels more after holding out for so long! Should Jeremy and Stephen need evidence of just how distressed the Top Doctors are, I recommend that they read a recent post on Rob Poole’s blog. Under normal circumstances I would not recommend anyone to waste their time reading anything by Rob Poole, but he posted up a wonderful piece recently, in which he waxed lyrical about meeting up with his old medical school mates again on a trip to London where they saved the life of someone whom they encountered in the street – this from a man who does not tell his patients who have appointments with him that he can’t make it because he’s off on a jolly to India, so those patients are left sitting on a ward believing that Dr Poole is going to appear for a long awaited consultation at any minute. After their heroics they all got talking over a few drinks (Rob is supposed to have a research interest in alcohol abuse no less) and Rob was reminded of their days in St Georges Medical School bar (start your career as you mean to go on Rob – in the bar) when they were all so bright eyed and bushy tailed. Rob looks at them now and is gobsmacked by how many of them are jaded and disillusioned and indeed have retired! As Rob explains they have retired to go sailing, to go on round the world trips, luxury holidays…. Cos it’s all just been so hard…Rob’s blog has taken on the quality of Jeffrey Archer’s writings after he was imprisoned when he would say things like ‘Are you listening Home Secretary?’ as he recounted the terrible conditions in whichever prison that they banged him up in – only Rob is appealing to the Labour Party to save the Top Docs and ensure that they continue to trouser £100k pa as the absolute basic.

To return to Stephen and Jeremy – they are obviously worried that Theresa is going to crumble and that the other Jeremy is in danger of entering Number 10. However since Crabb and Hunt started falling in love with the NHS, Grenfell Tower went up in flames incinerating God knows how many not very well off Londoners who were crammed in there and charged £1,600/month rent and the Tories now have far bigger problems than the ever demanding Top Doctors. Perhaps a bit of that dosh that Hunt and Crabb wanted liberated could be sent in the direction of people really in need and be used to build some decent social housing. Not that it can ever be built fast enough to save Theresa’s neck -today she was reassuring the nation that the survivors from Grenfell Tower will all be rehoused locally. I don’t know how, because the only reason that any of them were prepared to pay so much rent for such poor accommodation is that there is no spare housing at all in London. Except of course for all those empty luxury properties owned by the Russian mafia.

There have been more drug raids in north Wales, class A drugs have been seized in Bangor. It transpires that all these drugs busts are part of Operation Rattle, active in Gwynedd and on Ynys Mon. Oh well CAIS is still a roaring success in controlling the substance abuse problem them.

The shenanigans at Conwy County Council continue. A recent post explained how Gareth Jones from Plaid had done a deal with Chery Carlisle, a Conservative, and a coalition was proposed. It caused an awful lot of trauma among the rest of Plaid who were horrified at the thought of the Council sharing power with the Tories and the arrangement has now been vetoed by the Plaid National Executive. Alun Ffred, Plaid’s Chair, has stated that Plaid will not form a cabinet involving Conservatives. Which is odd, because as my posts giving details of the public servants and politicians who turned a blind eye to the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal illustrate, Plaid and the Tories both worked very hard to keep the lid on all that, it could have been described as a symbiotic relationship. A leaked e mail has stated that a Plaid/Tory coalition would have a ‘catastrophic effect’ locally and one Trystan Lewis has already fallen on his sword, resigning from the Cabinet because he fears that his presence has ‘put the party in a difficult position’. I think that Gareth Jones’s presence has put the party in an even more difficult position – not only did he come up with this brainwave for a coalition with the Tories, but long, long ago Gareth knew all about the sexual abuse of children in care in north Wales (please see post ‘It’s A Piece Of Cake’) but his lips have remained firmly buttoned, all through the Waterhouse Inquiry, all through the years that he spent as the AM for Aberconwy…. Because no-one knew about those kids being beaten and raped did they, no-one at all…

Now to matters at Plaid-dominated Gwynedd County Council. They’re featuring in ‘Private Eye’ again. The latest issue supplies details of the generous allowances and payments that the Councillors are receiving, as they cut services and workers pay. It is mentioned that one brave Councillor told them that it appears to the people of Gwynedd that they are lining their pockets at the expense of the citizens. Nonetheless, the Councillors then voted for an increase in their allowances. Gwynedd Councillors and certain employees have enjoyed many perks and privileges that would probably precipitate a council tax strike if they were widely known about and it’s been going on for years – please see post ‘News Round Up, March 24 2017’ for the details of just the scams and fiddles that I knew about. Meanwhile, virtually all the public bogs have been shut down in Gwynedd and the parking charges have almost doubled. This affects local people as well, but it really clobbers tourists, whom the Council maintain that they are trying to encourage. (A lot of the Tourist Info places have been closed as well, which is a rather odd thing to do if you want to encourage tourists.) I’ll be surprised if any tourists return in the face of what is happening. The arguments regarding the closure of the bogs was bizarre. One Councillor some months ago when faced with allegations that this was discriminatory against people with certain health conditions maintained that ‘disabled people’ never take unplanned journeys anyway – she maintained that they always made travel plans that involved strategic bog stops. Try telling that to someone who has Crohn’s Disease, or IBS, or has had prostate surgery – the effect of these conditions is not in the least bit predictable. They certainly won’t dare visit Gwynedd in the future.

The ‘Eye’ has another reference to wales as well. They have named a Cardiff haemophilia specialist, Professor Arthur Bloom, as someone who was putting patients at risk by using them as uninformed ‘guinea pigs’ for blood products of uncertain safety back in the 80s. Bloom had previously worked at the Oxford Haemophilia Centre, then moved to Cardiff, where he became the doctor of a little boy called Colin Smith. Bloom’s experimenting resulted in Colin becoming infected with HIV and hepatitis C and he died at seven years old in 1990. The campaign group ‘Tainted Blood’ have acquired letters written by Bloom which they maintain shows that he was criminally negligent towards haemophiliacs. That man of the people Andy Burnham, in his last Commons speech as an MP, threatened to take the letters to the police if the Gov’t didn’t act, claiming that there needed to be an inquiry as there had been a ‘criminal cover-up on an industrial scale’. Which I’m sure that there was – just like there was in the case of Mid-Staffs. In that case the name of the Minister who refused an inquiry for years despite evidence of criminal conduct and negligence was one Andy Burnham.

The ‘Eye’ also has two mental health failure stories, in this case two seriously mentally ill people killing themselves in prison when they should never have been in prison in the first place. The inquests into Callum Smith and Caroline Hunt both found multiple failures on the part of mental health services and prison staff. Both Callum and Caroline were suicidal and were ‘dealt with’ by being isolated in their cells. They both hung themselves. The coroners in each case wrote to both health authorities and the prison authorities regarding the prevention of further deaths. Which reminds me – the Betsi has by now received quite a few such coroners letters, but they don’t seem to be having much effect. Deborah Coles from ‘Inquest’ described Callum’s and Caroline’s deaths as ‘wholly preventable’, blaming the starvation of the mental health services which has led to a shortage of psychiatric beds and an over-reliance on a prison service that can’t cope. I’m a great admirer of Deborah Coles and have found her to be one of the few people working in the Third sector who is not afraid to be honest about how bad the nation’s mental health services are – note the complete silence of MIND on all these prison deaths of seriously ill people. However I do disagree with Deborah about the cause of this problem – the mental health services have been sending patients to prison now for years, regardless of the state of Gov’t investment in the services. Furthermore the mental health services in north Wales perjured themselves to ensure that patients ended up in prison if those patients had complained about the mental health services or if they were children who’d been abused in care. This is about negligent, criminal mental health staff, not money. As well as the vindictive targeting of certain patients, there has also been a philosophical and political shift, which has resulted in society failing to identify distress and instead demanding that people should ‘take responsibility’, even if their clinical condition precludes them from doing this. The sociologist Loic Wacquant has written extensively about this neoliberal penality and has taken a particular interest in how great swathes of black people in the U.S. have been criminalised and subsequently disenfranchised (actually as a result of legislation passed by Bill Clinton, assisted by that Heroic Role Model to the rest of us with ovaries, Hillary). I believe that in the UK the phenomenon is most obvious among people with mental health problems. When they don’t recover, it’s not because the care and treatment are crap or because they have a long term problem, it’s because they have a Borderline Personality Disorder and they are Untreatable and prison will show ’em. This approach very obviously led to the mortality rate that Tony Roberts presided over but such was the disaster involved that absolutely no-one would admit that this man was decimating patients and the GMC resorted to utilising forged documents to conceal the nightmare (see post ‘The General Medical Council And Yet Another Forged Document’).

The ‘Eye’s’ medical correspondent M.D. aka Dr Phil Hammond, discusses the Gov’ts lame anti-radicalisation programme Prevent. He compares the failure of Prevent with the failures of psychiatry and social work: ‘Every day psychiatrists in understaffed overwhelmed services have to prioritise the suicide risks of those who have only just started self-harming and those who have been doing it for years…social workers overwhelmed by their caseloads have to juggle the risks to abused children’. I’m not quite sure that it works like that Phil. It might now and again, for the few decent committed people trying to do a good job – and there are a few of them. However they are vastly outnumbered by their colleagues who are either punitive or simply don’t give a fuck. If you are a self-harmer you are highly likely to be met with mental health professionals who refuse to assess let alone treat you and as for children’s social services – er, the organised abuse and trafficking of ‘looked after’ children in nearly every region of the UK springs to mind… Interestingly enough Phil goes on to state that ‘some terrorists are doctors whose grievances are overfed by the UK military interventions and foreign policies…citizens must be supported to speak up’. Phil then recommends that Prevent should be widened to ‘encompass speaking up about any serious crime (child abuse, rape, murder, people trafficking, fraud, extremism) using the Crimestoppers model’. Well Phil your colleagues really have given me thirty years of hell – because I discovered that some of them were concealing a paedophile ring. This may have ‘overfed’ my criticisms of psychiatry but I have not yet resorted to locking any of them in a cage and slowly burning them to death, which is what the ISIS doctor did to someone. The ISIS doctor who had previously worked at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd before he went into action with ISIS. As for Crimestoppers – I knew someone in north Wales who repeatedly telephoned Crimestoppers to report a psychiatrist who was involved in the illegal sale and distribution of drugs, in the concealing of child abuse and in the coercion of patients into prostitution. This man also reported the suspicious death of one of this psychiatrist’s patients. Names, dates and details of the offences were given. Nothing happened. So the man rang back a few weeks later to ask why no action had been taken – only to be told that his call had been classified as a hoax. So he gave all the details again. Still nothing happened. At the time that this man was making those calls, the colleagues of that psychiatrist in the social services were being investigated for child abuse and soon after that the Waterhouse Inquiry was held – denounced by many as a massive cover up. The same psychiatrist had been sued for false imprisonment and had been the subject of numerous complaints to the GMC. But no action was taken. Hoax call? I don’t think even Crimestoppers believed that was a hoax call. So there must have been some other reason why no action was taken. Phil Hammond provides many good insights – I remember that he memorably described the London medical schools as being run by ‘fat masons’, which I am told was the prevailing situation at St Georges – but I don’t think that he’s quite grasped the essence of Crimestoppers.

Which brings me onto the Shirley Oaks Survivors Association (SOSA), who also feature in the latest edition of the Eye. SOSA are the group of the former residents of Lambeth Council children’s homes who have walked out of the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse. Just before they walked out, the third Chair of the Inquiry walked out, Judge Lowell Goddard. The ‘Eye’ reveals that the reason that both Judge Goddard and SOSA walked out was because the Home Office was trying to impose it’s own team of officials on Goddard. She rightly pointed out that would not make it an ‘independent’ inquiry. It is very clear that the Gov’t micromanaged the Waterhouse Inquiry and presumably they expect to do the same with the Independent Inquiry. Goddard and SOSA are still in touch and SOSA have published their own report into the happenings at Lambeth which is alleged to focus on the multiple failings of the Home Office. I have been in touch with SOSA but they have told me that their report isn’t available until later this summer due to legal constraints, but they have promised to send me a copy when it’s available. SOSA’s website names many of the paedophiles who were active in the children’s homes, so I asked them if they were going to name any of the councillors or politicians who colluded or covered up the abuse. They have named some councillors in their report but not any politicians. So if anyone wants to find out which politicians were involved – as well as other respectable members of society who believed that they’d actually got away with all this – Service Shenanigans is the site to follow.

Of course, some children from Lambeth were sent to children’s homes in north Wales. I will be posting up more soon about the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal with more names of those involved at all levels.

So far this blog has described a network of people stretching across Wales who seem to have been assisting each other in concealing the long-standing problems in the mental health services (and wider NHS) in north Wales. The mycelia of this network reached into England as well as I discovered in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I had been warned about this by a nurse who formerly worked at Ysbyty Gwynedd who was becoming alarmed at what was happening to me at the hands of the mental health services – he warned me that Dr Dafydd Alun Jones and co were not very nice people and that they were going to make my life very difficult. This nurse knew that I’d just been offered a job in London and told me to be careful – because ‘it’s a small world’.

Nonetheless I took up a job at St Georges Hospital Medical School in London and I’d only been there a few weeks when I had a visitor. A very friendly extrovert appeared in the tea room and said that he’d been told that there was a girl from Bangor working in the dept and that he had connections in Bangor too and wanted to meet up with her. I identified myself and he introduced himself – he was a junior obstetrician called Jimmy Schroff who’d just started work at St Georges. He sat down for a natter and interestingly enough he seemed to know an awful lot of the same people that I had encountered in Bangor. He had worked in the same surgery as Dr DGE Wood (the GP who had referred me to the dreadful Gwynne Williams the lobotomist and who had told me that I ‘wasn’t allowed’ to complain). He was very rude and forthright indeed about some of the administrators in Ysbyty Gwynedd, but I knew that a lot of the doctors hated them anyway so this didn’t ring any alarm bells. But then he said something very interesting – he asked me directly whether I knew one of the psychiatrists that I had complained about in Bangor and asked me what I thought of him. Which seemed rather odd what with Jimmy Schroff being an obstetrician. I didn’t respond but carried on listening and he literally reeled off the names of a whole load of people known to me in the NHS in north Wales – none of whom worked in obs and gynae – but all of whom by now I had suspected were involved in some very questionable practices. He didn’t mention one person who was not known to me – which was one hell of a coincidence for a random meeting with someone else who had just happened to work in Bangor. He then dashed off back to work and I never encountered him again.

I often wondered whether he was part of the network that were trying so hard to silence me, but he didn’t seem like one of them – he was far more competent for a start and seemed much more normal than the very obviously dysfunctional people whom I was having such trouble with. However in 2005 when I finally retrieved my full medical files I had a surprise – among the very old records was a photocopy of a letter printed on headed North Wales Hospital Denbigh paper. The quality of the photocopying was so poor that I was unable to read the signature – but the content of the letter could just about be read. It was a letter to someone else (their name could not be distinguished either) asking whether their friend had found out which department in St George’s I was working in yet. I never did get to the bottom of Jimmy Schroff’s brief visit to me because he didn’t stay working at St George’s long. I have since discovered that Jimmy Schroff died in 2003. His widow works for the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board.

There was however another connection between Wales and St Georges. Whilst I was working at St George’s the Dean was one Sir William Asscher. (He was described to me by a colleague as ‘an absolute bastard’.) I later found out that William Asscher had spent much of his career in Cardiff, had a home in Wales as well as in London and had been instrumental in developing renal medicine in Wales. Not so long ago I found newspaper archive footage dating from the 1980s relating to a new renal unit that had been established at Ysbyty Gwynedd. It praised the man whom it claimed had been responsible for facilitating the establishment of the unit – a Dr William Asscher from Cardiff. William Asscher died in 2014.

After leaving St George’s I found evidence that people working there certainly were well aware of some of the malpractice in north Wales, but seemed to be taking the view that it wasn’t on their patch so why worry and what else could one expect from the medical services in Wales. (I remember clearly a ‘joke’ being made whilst I worked there regarding the really bad doctors being sent to Wales to work, which was indeed exactly what happened to a much loathed doctor who worked at St George’s whilst I was there. He was serially sexually harassing staff, fell out with everyone and then failed some professional exams. He now works at a Spire Hospital in south Wales and has an extensive private practice down there. When the dreadful Brian Gibbons was Health Minister in Wales he gave this man an award.) I will be blogging further details regarding the knowledge that people at St George’s had regarding the wrongdoing in north Wales – and how they all kept schtum – soon.

Many years after I left St George’s I was talking to a senior social scientist who had worked in London and knew St George’s well. I was telling him about some of my more bizarre experiences there and he said that there were major problems at St George’s and Springfield (the associated psychiatric hospital) and that the institution was heavily influenced by Freemasonry. Which is another theme that I keep encountering when discussing the problems in the north Wales NHS. It was first mentioned to me in 1987 by MIND in Leicester (please see my blog post ‘The Mysterious Silence of MIND’) and of course rumours of Freemasonry constantly swirl around discussions of the north Wales child abuse scandal. These rumours were so persistent that when Secretary of State for Wales Stephen Crabb made his speech after the heavily redacted Macur Review was published, not only did he feel obliged to stress to the House that there were no ‘national figures’ involved in the paedophile ring, but that there was no evidence of involvement of Freemasonry. Yet the rumours persist and investigative journalists have dug up evidence that some of the people accused of abusing children in north Wales and some of those charged with investigating the abuse were indeed members of Masonic Lodges.

For years I tended to dismiss the Freemasonry allegations as a spurious bit of conspiracy theory – a lot of those involved may have been Freemasons, but they were members of many other overlapping networks as well. But a few years ago when the intimidation and harassment of me at the hands of the north Wales mental health services had become very public, a very level headed senior academic asked me if I thought that all this was connected to Freemasonry because he had noticed that this was all being driven by institutionalised corruption in medical and legal circles, both professions where Freemasonry is said to have influence…

This blog is not about the north Wales child abuse scandal – interested readers can easily access full details on the internet, it has been very widely written about – but one of the people who caused me serious problems was named in this scandal. That person is Lucille Hughes, former Director of Gwynedd Social Services…

It is now acknowledged that during the 1970s and 80s there was a paedophile ring operating in north Wales, across the regions of the former Gwynedd and Clwyd Councils, the victims being children who were in the ‘care’ of the local authorities. (As well as being the victims of paedophiles these children were also subjected to very great physical cruelty.) Numerous individuals, institutions and agencies have been named as colluding with the paedophile ring. There was a much publicised inquiry into this, the Waterhouse Inquiry, led by High Court Judge Sir Ronald Waterhouse, which resulted in the publication of the report ‘Lost in Care’ in 2000 – which was then denounced by many people as a whitewash. Allegations were made that the remit of the Waterhouse inquiry was such that key witnesses had not been interviewed and that the truth/full story had not been revealed. Very recently the Macur Review was held, led by Lady Justice Macur, which reviewed the Waterhouse Inquiry. The Macur Review seems to have been an absolute damp squib – the report produced by the review was so heavily redacted that it was virtually meaningless to readers, victims of the paedophile ring maintained that it was yet another cover-up and Stephen Crabb, then Secretary of State for Wales, reassured the House of Commons in 2016 that there were no ‘national figures’ involved (as had been widely alleged) and that child sexual abuse would not be tolerated. Two Welsh MPs, Liz Saville-Roberts (Plaid Cymru) and Ian Lucas (Labour) subsequently made angry speeches in the House demanding more information but everything has now gone very quiet. No ‘national figures’ may have been convicted of child sexual abuse in north Wales but national figures were most definitely involved in keeping it all quiet, just as ‘national figures’ knew about the disgraceful conduct of people in the north Wales mental health services. The police investigation into child sexual abuse in north Wales has resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of a number of people who formerly worked in children’s homes in north Wales. Yet it is widely believed in north Wales that by no means everybody who should have been investigated and prosecuted was.

No-one in a senior position or in public office was prosecuted as a result of the investigations into child abuse in north Wales. The attitude in the wider UK seems to have been that this didn’t really matter because it was ‘just Wales’ – I worked in a London medical school in the late 80s and early 90s (more details of this will appear elsewhere on this blog) and I actually heard people saying this when I mentioned some of the dreadful happenings in north Wales. They’re all just a bunch of Welsh sheepshaggers and we don’t have to worry.

Lucille Hughes was Director of Gwynedd Social Services whilst the sexual and physical assaults on children were happening and was named by Alison Taylor, the social worker who blew the whistle on what was going on, as being completely unresponsive to concerns raised regarding the paedophile ring. This was also the view taken in the Waterhouse Report. Lucille Hughes announced her ‘retirement’ upon the eve of the publication of the Waterhouse Report. I have never met Lucille Hughes but my medical records show that she certainly had an interest in me – not that I knew at the time.

There was a notoriously dreadful community mental health team in Gwynedd, the Arfon team, who were for many years based at 26 College Road, Bangor. The Arfon team were a combination of mental health professionals from both the NHS and Gwynedd Social Services. They were led by a social worker, Keith Fearns, who was described to me by someone who used to work in Gwynedd Social Services as ‘the most abusive professional that I have ever met’. (There will be much more about the Arfon Community Mental Health Team on this blog – for years their abuse and neglect of patients went uninvestigated but after the reorganisation of the NHS in north Wales Fearns and co were finally investigated and dismissed.) The Arfon team absolutely hated me although I’d actually had very little contact with them. I was told that Fearns at one point was telling people that he would ensure that ‘no decent person’ would ever have anything to do with me. They refused to provide a key worker for me because I had ‘upset people’. (I was told more recently how someone who’d tried to blow the whistle on the paedophile ring had been refused help from Gwynedd Social Services when she became disabled years later because she too had ‘upset people’. As a friend observed ‘she upset a gang of paedophiles twenty years ago and that’s why she can’t get the help that she’s legally entitled to’.)

Before I’d even met most members of the Arfon Community Mental Health Team, in the early 1990s they tried to have me imprisoned. (Details on what led up to this will appear elsewhere on this blog.) They had obtained a High Court Injunction against me by making serious allegations – I was unable to defend against the allegations because it was an ex parte injunction and I didn’t have access to the unlimited public funds for litigation that they seemed to have. The injunction banned me from their premises at 26 College Road, Bangor. College Road is a main thoroughfare and in those days many students and people I knew lived in the area. I was also utterly fed up of the constant grief and threats that I was by now receiving from the mental health services and I dared to walk down College Road past number 26 on a small number of occasions. So Gwynedd Social Services took me to court for breaking the injunction. I and my lawyers received papers stating that the case was to be heard in Chester and Gwynedd Social Services were requesting that I be ‘committed’ to prison. So we arrived for the case – only to find that the case had been moved to a different court with a different judge at the very last minute. But my barrister hadn’t been told and had arrived at the wrong court. Keith Fearns, Jackie Brandt, Maggie Fookes and Bob Ingham, all employees of College Road at that time, had made statements about me alleging that they’d all witnessed me breaking the injunction on numerous occasions and they arrived in person to give evidence – they’d all arrived at the correct court. My barrister arrived very late and very stressed asking why on earth she had been sent to the wrong court. She then warned me that although the witnesses against me had clearly been lying and all their statements clashed, we had now been landed with a notoriously harsh judge – he was a Justice Roche. (Fearns, Fookes and Ingham hadn’t co-ordinated their lies and their statements were all completely inconsistent with each other. They had all produced completely different times and dates when I had allegedly been seen by all of them at once.) The case began and a very bad tempered Roche got angrier and angrier, but with my barrister interestingly enough, not with witnesses who had clearly not been telling the truth, as she pointed out the inconsistencies in the witness statements. In the end he then made a most generous offer to the staff of College Road and their barrister – would they like to go away and rewrite their statements? (Presumably to co-ordinate their lies.) Their barrister then backed off, politely refusing this generous offer, saying that this court case had already cost Gwynedd Social Services a lot of money. I was not imprisoned and left the court. In 2005 when I finally received copies of my medical records, I found documents relating to this case. There was a handwritten message from Gwynedd County Council’s lawyer, who had been in extensive correspondence with Lucille Hughes, to the College Road team telling them to remember to attend the correct court because the case had been reassigned. So Lucille Hughes, the County lawyer and the Arfon Community Mental Health Team knew something that my barrister did not. Had this been a one off I would have presumed it was a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but a lot of other very odd things happened regarding the many legal cases that the north Wales NHS and Gwynedd Social Services brought against me, which will be detailed on this blog…

As for Justice Roche, I have researched high and low for more information about him. He seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Lucille Hughes now sits on the Board of CAIS, a north Wales charity established and chaired by Dr Dafydd Alun Jones. I was told a long time ago that Lucille Hughes was a former partner of Dafydd Alun Jones – by the time that Lucille was sending handwritten messages to people bearing false witness against me I had of course made a number of very serious complaints about Dafydd Alun Jones and on more than one occasion he had already threatened to have me imprisoned (detailed elsewhere on this blog).

The north Wales child abuse scandal touched my life in other ways too. Because I stayed in north Wales after graduation I started to mix with local people rather than just students. I heard first hand accounts of the appalling negligence of the local authorities towards the children in their care. I also got to know a man who had grown up in care in north Wales – some very unfortunate things happened to him. He kept getting sacked from local jobs and at one point his house mysteriously caught fire. His girlfriend at the time simply said that he was having a lot of ‘bad luck’ because he’d grown up in care. Years later I met his this woman again and she told me that he had left Wales and started a new life for himself in Europe. He had learnt the language, had a family and a stable career. And I bet his house didn’t catch fire either. (The many television documentaries that have been made about child abuse in north Wales have detailed how many of the children involved are now dead, after encountering very serious difficulties in their lives. Others, like the man I knew, had moved overseas.) I also came across other people who had grown up in care in north Wales in the mental health system, as patients in the North Wales Hospital Denbigh and elsewhere. I knew someone who worked in one of the children’s homes investigated who confirmed that a very cruel, corrupt regime was in place.

When the Waterhouse Report was published among a blaze of publicity in 2000 I was attending a short course in Coleg Menai, Bangor. Two of the teachers on the course were social workers. The morning after the publication of the Waterhouse Report we had a class with one of these social workers – they walked in and started the lesson with the words ‘One thing that is not going to be discussed today and will not ever be discussed is the Waterhouse Report’. And indeed it was never mentioned again on that course – although this was a health and social care course that covered child protection.

As everybody cracks open the champagne in the wake of Gordon Anglesea being sent down, there are still a lot of us asking when all those systems and people who facilitated and/or concealed what was going on are going to be brought into the public domain? There have been some very odd things going on in the public services in north Wales over the past few decades and the conviction of Gordon Anglesea only scratches the surface.